‘Where Belgium goes, Europe goes’

“If you want to know how the EU will look like in about five years time, you should look at Belgium today”, writes former Belgian MEP Derk Jan Eppink in De Volkskrant. Both are “permanent construction sites where the roofs are rebuilt to hide a problem with the foundations”, and share a similar outcome after the 25 May elections (general elections took place in Belgium on the same day as European elections in most of member countries) as well as the same fundamental problem: a gap between North and South.

The formation of a Belgian government is never easy (after the 2010 elections it took 541 days), but this time it might be even more difficult: the voters in Flanders voted for the nationalistic party N-VA, while in Wallonia the voters “marched to the left: the ruling Socialist party lost many votes to the local Communist party. Flemish voted more to the right, Walloons leftist”. Eppink wonders if it will be possible to form a Belgian federal government after those results.

The elections for the European Parliament show a similar pattern: “In Mediterranean Europe the left won, in the North, it was the right” that took the upper hand. Eppink thinks these results will complicate the distribution of the European top jobs: “The EU is heading now to an intergovernmental conference for institutional renovations ‘à la Belge’.”

He feels the problem of the EU and Belgium lies in the foundations of socio-economic development. Both have to deal with a growing gap between the North and South. “North believes that the South should hurry up with structural reforms and the South finds the North selfish and anti-social. That has caused polarization within Belgium for a few decades, and is increasingly doing so in the EU.”

European and Belgian politicians can entrench themselves "behind their Maginot Line against the evil outside world", like they did when the N-VA was held outside the federal government by the other parties, but this tends to sort the opposite effect: Bart De Wever, leader of the N-VA was the winner of the latest general elections. The same has happened in the European Parliament: in 2009 about one fifth of it was Eurosceptic, but the “established political groups ignored any criticism”. Now one third of the EP is from “critical to extreme anti”.

Eppink recommands the EU have a closer look at Belgium:

Where Belgium goes, Europe goes. If the EU continues to follow the Belgian track, the consequences will be global. It is useful for europoliticians to look at that puny-looking Belgian government formation.