BRUSSELS - This is a European country riven by ethnic tensions. Its public debt is almost as big as its total annual output and it's in the middle of a political crisis so deep that this week it passes Iraq as the modern-day state whose politicians have taken the longest to form a government.
Yet the buses run more or less on time, the garbage is collected twice a week, exports of pharmaceuticals, steel cord, chocolate and beer are uninterrupted — and it can still take about a month to get a new telephone line.
Governing is never easy. In the past year or so, it has sometimes seemed impossible. Just ask North Africa’s rulers who, after a long period of stability, not to mention repression and abuses, have faced popular uprisings demanding their ousters. In the United States, the big two parties have fallen victims in different ways to the upstart populist Tea Party movement. In Europe, governments in Britain and Ireland have been kicked out in the aftermath of the financial crisis. This month, the government in Portugal collapsed.
Meantime in Belgium, whose Dutch- and French-speaking parties can’t agree on what powers should be devolved from the centre to the regions, the absence of government is hardly commented on. More than nine months after a June 2010 election, talk in bars and cafes strays only occasionally to the country’s political predicament. "We’re not really following it anymore," says a bartender in the Flemish town of Mechelen with a shrug.
"It’s a crisis without an audience," says Carl Devos, politics professor at the University of Ghent. "It’s a bit absurd."
In a world of upheaval, the fact that one of its oldest democracies has kept ticking over without validated political leadership is remarkable, even if its citizens don’t see it.
Belgium managed the whole of its six-month presidency of the European Union last year with a caretaker government. That same government has laid out a 2011 budget and dispatched fighter jets to play their part in guaranteeing the no-fly zone over Libya. In the first three months of 2011 it’s reached almost half its target for this year’s bond issues.
Would some countries work better without a government? Could the world learn something from Belgium’s experience?
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One thing’s for sure, having no government can be cheaper. New administrations bring new projects — and new costs.
"One consequence of not having a working government is that the cost of public spending is not so high," says Philippe Ledent, economist at financial services company ING Belgium. "In the short-term, there is no real negative effect. I thought there would be on confidence, but in the end it’s been rather limited."
Financial markets were rattled by Belgium’s political paralysis at the end of November and early January, but since the start of February they seem to have calmed. Government 10-year bond yields are a little above 4 percent, about 1 percentage point more than benchmark German equivalents.
That compares with spreads of nearly 7 percent and over 9 percent respectively for EU bailout recipients Ireland and Greece. This year could have been a challenge with around 26 billion euros of Belgian bonds due to mature, but heavy issuance in 2010 allowed the debt agency to buy back a third of the maturing paper ahead of time.
Even though Belgium’s public debt is well above the euro zone average, it has not carried out austerity measures like those seen in other European countries, because there’s no fully fledged government empowered to enact them.
"I have heard it said that a caretaker government is the best you can have, as it is most unlikely to raise taxes," says Rudy Andeweg, political science professor at Leiden University.
Business confidence is at its highest level since July 2007. In February, consumer confidence too was also also at a 3-1/2 year high, although surging oil prices dragged it down a little in March.
There have been hiccups: Belgium’s business federation says some IT companies reliant on public sector contracts have been hit by the fact that the government can only roll over small payments, and can’t launch new tenders. Smaller banks would likely have benefited from an adjustment to banking taxation, which the financial community backs, but which cannot be enacted until a government is in place.
But being in the euro has sheltered the country from the most dramatic consequences. Since 1999, Belgium’s monetary policy has been determined by central bankers in Frankfurt.
OLD DIVISIONS
One of the secrets to Belgium’s stability is force of habit. Like the Netherlands next door, the country of nearly 11 million is used to having caretaker governments for extended periods.
Proportional representation — which gives parties parliamentary seats based on their share of the vote rather than handing all power to the overall winner — makes it usual for governments to rule in coalitions, and coalitions take time to form.
It’s not an uncommon set-up in Europe: Austrians, Italians, Finns or Germans are pretty sanguine about a gap between an election and a new government taking power. In Germany, a "grand coalition" of the main centre-left and centre-right parties took two months to form in 2005 and in Austria four months were needed in 1999-2000 for the Christian Democrats and the far-right Freedom Party to forge an alliance.
In countries with a winner-takes-all system, single-party rule is the norm and the prospect of a coalition can be more alarming. Britain is a good example: last year, the threat of protracted wrangling between the three main parties rattled financial markets before May’s election, causing a sell-off of government bonds, or gilts. In the end, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats forged a coalition just five days after the vote, but not before the pound had slid, British shares had fallen and gilts had underperformed their German counterparts.
Belgians are used to long drawn-out discussions. The cause of the latest political row dates back decades, to the creation of separate linguistic areas in 1962 which laid the ground for the country’s current structure.
That in itself was years in the making. Now, despite fresh suggestions that the country should split itself in two along ethnic lines, Belgian leaders seem happy to keep talking.
"As complex as the situation is at the moment, it is still much simpler than the problems that would arise if we decided that the Belgian state must be dissolved," says Karl-Heinz Lambertz, premier of Belgium’s small group of German speakers, who are mostly viewed as neutral in the stand-off between Dutch- and French-speakers.
