Can someone please how the Belgian government works and how can the country stay without a government for over 500 days.
In: Other
In Belgium we have three official language **communities**: Dutch, French and German. And geographically speaking, there are three main **regions**: Flanders , Wallonia and Brussels.
In Flanders they speak Dutch, Wallonia is mainly French but the small German speaking part falls in here too, and in Brussels they speak mostly French, but also a bit of Dutch and a lot of other languages.
So the areas and languages don’t exactly fit onto eachother, so we now have a **local government for all 3 regions and all 3 communities**:
* French community
* German community
* Walloon region
* Brussels region
* Flanders region and Flemish community share the same government
And then above that we have the **federal government.**
Now you can imagine that it’s hard to have so many governments in such a small country. A lot of debate has been going on about **which responsibility belongs to which government.** Changes in that assignment of responsibility require a change in the constitution, which requires a 2/3 majority in the federal parliament.
Our 541 day formation round was for the federal government, and mainly concerned the separation of “Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde”. This is an area around Brussel where a lot of French-speaking people work in Brussels but live in Flanders, and therefore needed to vote for Flemish politics. Previous governments had always ignored that problem, but now parties said “We’re not leaving until we have a deal” and well … it took them over 1,5 year.
All that time the previous government was still a government “of running affairs”, which means they can vote some common laws or urgent changes, but no real important laws.
Not all problems are solved now of course. In 2014 they chose to just ignore them again, but the formation after our elections last week will be difficult too. Hopefully it will be less than a year 😉
**TL;DR**
Belgium consists of different regions and communities, each with their own government below the federal government. Redistributing responsibilities requires a change in constitution, and a 2/3 majority in federal parliament, which is very hard to find.
“Shutdowns” don’t really exist in other countries. The American system is unique that everything freezes and stops functioning if a Budget isn’t passed by the president.
In Belgium, a large portion of the governance is done at a local region level (ie states) and not the national level. Each region had its own parliament and handled their own internal affairs. So the “shutdown” did not affect education, health, pensions or other public services.
Even then, their national government (ie federal) can still function even under a “shutdown”. The previous government is allowed to stay on as a “caretaker” until a successful election of the next party. There was virtually no difference from normal governance, except that no new laws could be passed. They just used the same old budget and same old policies as before.
It doesn’t
*Queue laughtrack*
Okay, first of all, you need to know we have A LOT of governments.
Only the federal government was out for over 500 days, and while we had no new government, we still had the old government tending to urgent and running business.
So no new laws were brought up during those days, but spending was regulated, all offices and services were funded. Urgent matters could be adressed if they couldn’t wait for the new government.
So it’s not like we did ‘t have any government, just not a *new government*
And while all that was going on, we still had Flemish, Walloon and Brussels Capital governments, also French and German speaking governments (the Dutch speaking government is incoorporated in the Flemish region government.
So while we had NO government, we still had A LOT of government.
Hope this cleared it up 😉
Also see [this](https://youtu.be/QlwHotpl9DA) or [this](https://youtu.be/2ehWO-f_6uk)
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