Lemmings in Belgium

This week, as has been widely noted, Claude Eerdekens saw his bill to cut state-funding to Vlaams Belang pass through the Senate and onto the statute book.

In point of fact, the new law only regulates the practical implementation of a more fundamental law that dates from 1999.  That one keeps things specific to parties convicted for “racism” and all evils attributed thereto.  So in itself Eerdekens’ law is no surprise.  The greater mystery is why a Flemish non-socialist majority party (in fact prime-minister Verhofstadt’s own conservative VLD party, which has the most to fear from Vlaams Belang) voted with their ideological enemies and, in so doing, scandalised the Flemish public.  That could only ever work to Vlaams Belang’s electoral advantage.  So, are the majority conservative politicians simply lemmings set upon suicide?

Bart Brinckman, who leads the Wetstraat (Downing Street) redaction of the Flemish quality newspaper De Standaard, calls the Flemish parties “opportunistic chickens”.  Only one party comes out of it looking better, he writes, and that’s Vlaams Belang.

Senator Marc van Peel of the oppositional Christian Democrats goes further.  He sees a conspiracy by French-speakers to weaken the other Flemish parties.  In “Villa Politica” - the politics programme broadcast on Friday - he asked, “How can the Flemish mainstream parties be so stupid?”  His own conservative oppositional CD&V suffers as much from this law as does Verhofstadt’s VLD – in both cases, of course, to the advantage of Vlaams Belang.  Van Peel is only too aware that Verhofstadt is dragging both parties over the cliff.

So, let’s return to where the story began.

Because of much bribery and scandal in the past Belgium has a strict party-funding system that makes private funding marginal.  It is illegal for politicians and parties to accept donations from companies or accept donations from private individuals of over €125 ($164 or £87.5). All political parties are, therefore, state-dependent.

Given that, Eerdekens reasoned, and given the fact that November’s banning of the Blok had been circumvented simply by founding a new party, why not give the 1999 law some real teeth?  Why not starve Vlaams Belang by cutting its funding?  And the rest we know.

But who precisely is this character, Claude Eerdekens?  Well, in February 2001 the same Claude Eerdekens , the parliamentary leader of the Parti Socialiste, declared in Parliament that 99% of the immigrants in Brussels—historically a Dutch-speaking city — filed their naturalisation papers in French.

“We do more”, he boasted, “to turn Brussels into a Francophone city than the Flemings can ever do to prevent it.”

In such an atmosphere, then, the establishment is admitting inviting foreign immigrants - mainly French-speaking Moroccans - to come to Belgium and apply for citizenship.  The policy-aim is unambiguous: to change the ethnic balance and the spoken tongue away from Flemish.

But apprentice-wizard Eerdekens made a basic mistake with his magic kit.  People are not stupid.  They notice that kind of thing.  In particular, the residents of Brussels and the hundreds of thousands of Flemish who commute there each day notice a fundamental change in their quality of life.  To quote Eurostat (urbanaudit): in London the yearly probability of getting murdered is 3/100.000, but in Brussels it is 10/100.000.  I am quite certain that the picture is the same with the other crimes of the person.  Certainly, Brussels’ known problem with Islamic terror would make such a proposition likely.  So yes, we notice … and yes, we fully understand the racial politics of the Walloon power elite and, therefore, the evil consistency with which they label all Flemish resistance “racism”.

In this hothouse atmosphere Flemish regional politics has produced a strange paradox.  In the Flemish Parliament Vlaams Belang saved its regional party funding by arguing that they are the legal successors of Vlaams Blok yet were a different party.  The Flemish Parliamentary office which decides such cases, and where Vlaams Belang’s political opponents have a majority, could easily have said that this was clearly nonsense.  Indeed, they did decide that Vlaams Blok and Vlaams Belang were same party and thus “guilty of racism”.  But they did not cut the funding.  No doubt they recoiled at the thought of the first attempt to destroy Vlaams Blok/Belang through the courts and the groundswell of sympathy for the underdog that created throughout Flanders.

However, as we have seen, in the Belgian Senate this week the Flemish majority parties did the opposite, voting in favor of the fund-cutting law.  The decision was not without its detractors.  Even commission president and majority Flemish socialist Ludwig Vandenhove (SP.A) called it “a tactical mistake”.  But why, for heaven’s sake, go right ahead and make it?

The unspoken supposition is that, tactically, there was little immediate harm to pleasing the French-speakers at this time.  That kind of thing poses more of a “long run” problem for the majority Flemish parties.  Besides, they calculate that a new prosecution and conviction of Vlaams Belang would be necessary before the funding lifeline could be cut.  So, they can relax … there’s no electoral need to give the French-speakers the “brush-off” just yet.

Of course, in that “long-run” the French-speakers are on a collision course with Vlaams Belang.  Independence for Flanders means the death of Belgium and the end 11,3 billion Eurodollar ($14,8 or £7,9)  financial transfers the French-speakers get ever year.  Victory for the French-speakers in the war on Flanders means the death of Flemish nationalism.  It has to be one or other: Belgium or a free Flanders.  Both can’t survive.  In that regard, Vlaams Belang senator Wim Verreycken did not pull any punches when he said that Vlaams Belang will have its place in history together with Eamon de Valera and Václav Havel, “who were honoured later as heroes”.

But is a new conviction really necessary before party-funding can be cut?  In legalistic Belgium the controversy had begun before the new law was even passed.  For sure, Vlaams Blok’s ban in 2004 dates from AFTER the principle-establishing law of 1999.  We must await to see whether the appropriate court, the State Council, will really view Vlaams Belang as a new party.

The French-speaking minority holds half of the seats in the State Council.  So, not much Flemish collaboration is necessary to win a majority.  At the Belgian federal level, no mercy cannot be expected for Vlaams Belang.

So what a pity, then, that the Flemish mainstream in the Senate didn’t take the chance, when Eerdekens’ proposal was debated this week, to vote for an amendment banning retroactivity.  The main “obstacle” to this crucial amendment was that the whole of the bill would first have had to go back to the Chamber of Deputies (Belgium has a bi-cameral system).  And that would taken too much time and, of course, bestowed too much attention – once again - upon Vlaams Belang and its travails.  Better a bad law than that the underdog steals away public sympathy and support from the politicians of the mainstream.  But we shall see what price will have to be paid for such short-sightedness … whether Vlaams Belang is finally put to the sword through their treachery or whether it will triumph and deliver Flanders from their cowardice.

I will end with Eerdekens who, for sure, is no lemming and who isn’t going to go over the cliff with the Flemish mainstream.  He is on record as saying, “The Flemish here [in the Parliament] obviously think that they are in the Flemish Parliament, but if they continue on this way Wallonia is not ashamed to live next to such a great country as France and, one day, they will find out that France will be bordering at the gates of Brussels!”

So there it is.  French-speakers will run things how they want, he is saying, and the Flemish will submit to everything and pay or he, Eerdekens, will disappear into France - eventually with Brussels and all of its international institutions, too.  The plan to connect Brussels via a corridor to Wallonia and thence the French-speakers’ homeland is not some vague blackmail.  Walloon minister-president Van Cau calls it a “continuité territoriale”.  Perhaps he never heard of the commission which was named after former French premier Edouard Balladur and which imposed respect for stable borders on the warring peoples of the Balkans.  Perhaps he doesn’t care and, anyway, considers that the theft of Flanders’ capital city is all the Flemish lemmings deserve.

Posted by Johan Van Vlaams on Saturday, January 15, 2005 at 09:05 AM in European Nationalism
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