Life may be a box of chocolates, but Belgian politics certainly are not. Outsiders pretty much know what to expect on the inside and so it was with the municipal elections this past Sunday.
Traditional parties who have been losing their creaminess while in office seek to fence what they still can before being unwrapped. Innovated noisier and occasional nut filled parties win votes and rebel against the established with a too glossy cherry on top, proclaiming future tasty victories on a wider national level in the future, denied by melting losers.
In their competing fury, all parties appear to forget the people that elected them in the first place, whereas perhaps what the electorate really needs is some chocolate milkshake, chocolate spread, chocolate springles, chocolate mousse ........
I spend many of my adolescent years in a then still relative informally bilingual Antwerp part of a not yet federal Kingdom and my interests did not - of course - connect with local politics at all. At present time however, they still do not and it strikes me that neighbouring countries, not to mention the rest of the world take a fairly similar position of indifference, which is intriguing if you consider the proportional amount of municipal, provincial, federal and national political bodies the country houses, not to mention the EU parliament and other institutions.
The to the ouside world apparent eternal inward looking struggle over language may gain more momentum than most would wish for when the next national elections are held in 2014, along with referenda in Scotland, Catalunya and, of course, the European Parliament.
I wonder if Mr Barroso, whose mandate is up also in 2014, would expect Flanders and Wallonie (and thus Brussels itself) to potentially negotiate EU membership in similar vein as he recently suggested Catalunya should.
Too many chefs in the praline kitchen maybe ?
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