In Belgium, the chips are down

What is it with the Belgians? They say Please when they mean Thank you.  They eat mayonnaise with their chips. The same city is called Antwerp and Anvers. No wonder they seem confused.

They are different from us. But the Walloon and Flemish communities of Belgium are also different from each other. Enter Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far right party who has suggested – on Belgium’s national day no less – that the French-speaking minority in Belgium, the Walloons, join up in a new region with France.

   It might seem like a shock suggestion. But it’s the sort of talk that you hear on every street corner in the country which has had no government for more than 400 days since the Flemish nationalist party NVA became the biggest party after elections in June last year.

   It reminds me somewhat of the situation in Quebec in the late 1970s which eventually led to René Lévesque’s 1980 provincial referendum on political separation from the rest of Canada. It failed. It’s true that the French-speaking Quebecois majority in Quebec culturally had nothing in common with the English-speakers. In Montreal they used to call the Anglophone and francophone communities “the two solitudes”. But now they recognize they are stuck with each other.

   Although the Belgians ran their African empire with disastrous consequences, they have given the world a rich legacy of culture. Belgium produced one of the greatest singer-poets of the last century, Jacques Brel. The French-speaking Belgians’ claim to fame includes the creator of Inspector Maigret, Georges Simenon, and the creator of Tintin, Hergé. They have Magritte. On the Flemish side let’s not forget Rubens, Van Eyck, Breugel and Van Dyck.

   I was in Brussels a couple of weeks ago when talks on the formation of a government collapsed, producing a Flemish headline in the French-language newspaper Le Soir:  “Neen”. Cue editorials predicting the breakup of the country. “Ceci n’est plus un pays,” said Le Soir, in a coy reference to the Magritte painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Belgium is dead, let’s finish it off, the Belgian editorialists said. However what was King Albert’s reaction? He was photographed visiting a biscuit factory wearing a fetching plastic bonnet.

   So Belgium doesn’t seem like a country in crisis. The deficit has actually gone down, despite the lack of government for over a year.

  Belgium is a country with a population the size of Portugal’s. The Belgians have muddled through despite their capital, Brussels, being engulfed by the euro crisis. Are the Walloons going to listen to the siren song of Marine Le Pen when the chips are down? I hope not.

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