Will Belgium revive?

The meter has already clocked up the record figure of 183 days of crisis and shows no signs of stopping. People no longer know what to say. All the possible solutions have been weighed in the balance and found wanting; some have been put into practice. Each citizen has contributed his own feelings, his own justifications, his own desires… Political commentators have analysed all this with wisdom and journalists have written editorials of every possible tone and persuasion. The deadlock risks having extremely grave consequences. Both in the north and in the south of the country, the image of Belgium has received a serious blow (not to speak of the damage caused to her image abroad). The tension, and especially the incomprehension, or more precisely, the misunderstanding, between the two communities has never been so strong. The two parts of the country have evolved in such opposite directions that they no longer understand each other, no longer know how to dialogue with each other. They attribute to each other feelings and intentions that they probably don’t have. And there’s perhaps something even more serious: the spectacle of a political class that fails to realize what it was elected for: make the country work. The ordinary citizen may have the impression that it’s all a question of a war of words, of verbal dérapage (most recently that of Radio Mille Collines), of personal sympathies and antipathies between the various leaders (the “cockfight” between Milquet and Reynders), of exaggerated electoral preoccupations, of the race for power … The “average Belgian” feels himself very badly represented. Few recognize themselves in their own elected representatives. And whom should they elect? Democracy increasingly seems like a partitocracy and the king himself is a prisoner of it. We need, however, to try to keep aloof, remain above the melée, something that Cardinal Danneels succeeded perfectly in doing on the occasion of the national day of the Dynasty on 15 November. “In his Letter to the Philippians, St. Paul adds these surprising words: ‘Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves’ (2: 3). I hardly dare to say so in this situation. But since St. Paul says so …” Let us underline that the challenge is also highly symbolic: in a globalized world that seeks its own unity, will we be a sign of solidarity? At a risk of appearing excessively optimistic, the Pope’s encyclical on hope comes at exactly the right time.