After the excitement in Belgium late last year of Van Rompuy being ‘elected’ as Mr Europe (President of the European Council), it should be back to business this year for Belgium. It will be a busy and difficult political year. In the second half of 2010 Belgium will hold the Presidency of the EU, thus with a Van Rompuy – Leterme tandem steering European policy. However, Leterme and his government will have a lot to do before that.
Firstly, there will be pressure on the Belgian Government to deal with the backlog on transposition of EU laws. Obviously, it would not look good for Belgium not having complied itself with EU law while chairing the EU. The Deputy Minister who is in charge of preparing the Belgian Presidency was apparently also of that view and thought it would be useful to convene a parliamentary working group to discuss the topic. However, it seems only then he realised that it was his own party-leader and Deputy Prime Minister Reynders who is by far leading in the backlog and he apparently tried to back out. It remains to be seen what will be left of his initial good intentions.
Secondly, Belgium will want to avoid a domestic political crisis during the EU presidency in order not to leave a ‘chaotic’ legacy as many consider the Czech’s have done with their Presidency of the EU last year. The problem is that there is still a big political hurdle going by the – for foreigners obscure – name of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV). The name simply refers to the name of an electoral district formed after a reform of the electoral districts in 2002. In 2003, the Belgian Court judged the reform to be in violation of the constitution with respect to BHV as the district covers different language areas (Brussels: bilingual, Halle and Vilvoorde: Dutch). There are several possible solutions to correct this, but the problem is that this issue goes to the very heart of the (language – though that does not quite do it justice) conflict between Flanders and Wallonia. Flemish Members of Parliament could in theory push through a solution as they constitute a majority in the Federal Parliament and several have threatened to try. Of course the Belgian political system has measures in place that can at least delay that in order to find political solutions through other ways. Most of those have however meanwhile been used up and now veteran Dehaene has been tasked to prepare the way for a compromise by Easter in order to avoid political crisis during the Belgian EU Presidency.
Of course the to-do list for 2010 is longer than just these two: there is still an economic crisis, unemployment and government deficit to deal with and climate change should be a priority more than ever after the ‘failure’ of Copenhagen. The question is, is the (second) Leterme Government ready to take it all on? If one looks at the ‘performance’ of one of its ministers in the Belgian Senate this week (see movie – after 1:30) one may have doubts. It has caused yet another polemic that Leterme has to deal with..
