Leterme gets a 2nd term

This week Yves Leterme will be taking over as prime minister from Herman Van Rompuy upon the latter’s appointment to EU Council president, announces De Morgen. Leterme, a Flemish Christian Democrat, had ceded the post to Van Rompuy after some turbulence at the top back in December 2008. But Belgium is holding its breath. Although the choice of Leterme seems logical, given his party’s hands-down victory in 2007, Belgians remember his failures: the fragile coalition between Flemish and Francophones that was mixed up in the fraud-ridden sale of Fortis Bank, stymied government reforms.…

To prepare the ground King Albert II has designated a “royal go-between”: ex-PM Wilfried Martens, an old hand if ever there was one – to “do the dirty work”. For one thing, the go-between is charged with “sweeping certain landmines” like the sensitive issue of how to delimit constituencies in bilingual Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde. Despite that intervention, “giving Yves Leterme another shot at this Gordian knot is doomed to fail,” foresees the Flemish daily. “Not only because he has already proven incapable of handling it, but also because none of the other parties will give him a victory for their language community.”