“The king is going to need a big box of paracetamol, the strong ones,” Bart De Wever, the mayor of Antwerp and leader of the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) party, gloated as Belgium’s election results rolled in.
The king is certainly in for a major headache. The Belgian head of state, whose role is mostly ceremonial, has to designate someone to form a government and avert a prolonged, PR nightmare of a crisis like the one that kept the country without a government for 589 days back in 2010-2011.
The trouble is, there are no good options — especially for the king.
Start with the N-VA’s first-place finish, with 16 perent of the vote. De Wever is a Flemish nationalist who backs independence for the country’s northern Flanders region and is no fan of the royal family and the role the king still plays in Belgian politics.
But that’s only half the story. The party in second place, the far-right Vlaams Belang, which took 12 percent of the vote, is even more hostile to the monarchy, and the very idea of Belgium itself.
These results have turned Belgium’s already fragile political climate into a full-blown tropical storm.
Then there’s the matter of Belgium’s unique federal and regional political dance. A look at the regional elections, held the same day, reveals a country split right down the middle.
The clash over immigration policy that caused Prime Minister Charles Michel’s center-right government — which included the N-VA — to collapse in December cost every coalition party some points at the ballot box.
That much was to be expected. But the election also deepened the country’s divisions, with Flanders turning decisively to the right, and French-speaking Wallonia and Brussels taking the exit ramp to the left.
In Flanders, 25 percent of voters chose the N-VA and another 18.5 percent cast their ballot for Vlaams Belang. In Wallonia, the Communists and the Greens surged, flanking the dominant Socialist Party on the left.
These regional governments will be easy enough to form. But a federal government that reconciles the preferences of voters on both sides seems close to impossible.
King Philippe (L) welcomes Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel for a meeting at the Royal Palace | Eric Lalmand/AFP/ via Getty Images
These results have turned Belgium’s already fragile political climate into a full-blown tropical storm. Or, more accurately, two storms — each with its own epicenter.
The French-speaking Socialists and the Flemish N-VA are still firm market leaders in their linguistic region. But both now have extremists breathing down their necks.
Funnily enough, both major parties have taken the same approach toward their junior challengers: friendly and appeasing in front of the cameras, full-on contempt behind the scenes.
There is no sign whatsoever that either the N-VA or the PS would ever form a coalition with their smaller, testosterone-loaded versions. Why run the risk of legitimizing the extremes, if there are more easygoing partners available?
The Flemish nationalists of the N-VA can and will easily find smaller moderate parties with which to form a center-right regional government in Flanders. The PS, meanwhile, will look toward the Greens and perhaps the centrist Christian Democrats to quickly form regional governments in Wallonia and Brussels. In decentralized Belgium, these regional governments control significant budgets and large public domains.
It is on the federal level that no one sees an immediate possible coalition. Neither the Flemish right and center, nor the Francophone left and center, control enough seats to propose a workable solution.
That leaves the king with a major conundrum on his hands. Should he tip the balance toward the north and hand the initiative over to the Flemish separatists? That seems unpalatable. The royal palace and King Philippe have no natural inclination to do business with the N-VA, to say the least. After all, the ultimate agenda of Bart De Wever is the end of Philippe’s kingdom.
The king would be wise to depart from tradition and set a new precedent.
But choosing to turn to the left, toward the Socialists in the south, would cause its own set of problems. Vlaams Belang’s surprise victory in Flanders is simply too stark to ignore. The laws of post-election political theater demand that a sign be given to an angry electorate — a gesture that their discontent has been “heard.”
The king will need to come up with a cautious approach that keeps him from getting stuck in unavoidable skirmishes between the two blocs. But the first hurdle to this process is a big one: Vlaams Belang has never before been invited to the palace. The policy has always been that there is no space for a far-right party in the royal house.
The king would be wise to depart from tradition and set a new precedent. After all, simply listening has never done anyone any harm. Refusing to invite a party that got almost 20 percent of the votes in its region would throw petrol on the burning Flemish separatist bonfire.
No wonder De Wever is smiling. Next to the extremist Vlaams Belang, the N-VA is starting to look rather more palatable as a governing party.
Wouter Verschelden is a Belgian journalist and founder of newsmonkey.be