No Government -- No Prob!

[flacaltenn]

Fahreed Zahkaria did a segment on his Sunday Show that just blew my mind. Particularly because the "mainstream" has managed to ignore this story for this long.

Cultural divisions and basic political indecision has held Belgium "headless" for 8 months. No central govt has been seated since the election. Life goes on almost perfectly.. Maybe we wouldn't miss Congress as much as they think...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...t-2213128.html

Eight months after national elections, the country's "caretaker" Prime Minister is still Yves Leterme, the man whom Belgium, or at least the northern part of Belgium, rejected last June.

The protests are significant, if vague, straws in the wind. The demonstrators, from both sides of the linguo-cultural divide, are calling for the recognition of some form of core Belgian identity. They have not offered any detailed suggestions on how to resolve any of the political, or economic or cultural tensions that seem to be tearing Belgium apart. After eight months, not even the glimmering of an agreement is in sight. There may have to be new national elections, even though new elections are unlikely to change very much.

Because so many everyday functions of state have already been ceded over the years to regional and community governments, the absence of an agreed federal coalition matters very little. The national budget deficit was less than predicted last year, partly because there was no national government to spend new money.

Dan Alexe, a Romanian-born Belgian film-maker said: "The trains and buses still run. The police are still operating. The post is late, but then it always was late. Maybe having 'no government' is preferable to having governments which collapse all the time."

Thomas Tindemans runs EU relations for Hill & Knowlton, the international PR firm, and is the son of the former Belgian prime minister Leo Tindemans. He said: "Most Belgians are like me, despairing but relaxed. It is foreigners who tend to get excited by the crisis. But, in truth, we can't go on without a national government for ever. There are strategic decisions, international and European decisions that have been on hold for too long."

The problem (one of many problems) is that, after 40 years of tinkering with the constitution and moving responsibility for many everyday decisions to the three "regions" or two language "communities" (plus a small German minority), it has become difficult to say what the Belgian state should continue to do. Or even, some Flemings argue, whether it has any sensible role at all.

Gee.. Maybe we SHOULD BE more like Europe after all...

They are having PARTIES and camp-outs instead of freakin out. Even with serious talk of dividing the country along French/Dutch lines.. Here's a cute byproduct of the stand-off -- a website created especially for the crisis..

http://belgiq.eu/