Belgium for Beginners, part 3

In the last episode I told you how Belgium manages to cope with only six governments for ten milion people. This time we’re going to take a look at the political parties who are all trying their hardest to be in these governments.

As with most European countries, there are four major political factions: Greens, Socialists/Social-democrats, Christian-democrats and what we call the Liberals (but in the classic sense: individual and economic freedom). These four are all represented as political parties, but with a twist: there are two versions of each one of them, a Dutch speaking and a French speaking one.

                    Green       Social-democrats     Christian-democrats     Liberals

Dutch           Agalev      SP.a                         CD&V                           VLD

French         Ecolo        PS                            cdH                               MR

Then there are several minor parties, not all of whom have an exact opposite:

• Vlaams Belang: far-right, want an independent Flanders, anti-immigrant. They get about 20% of the vote in Flanders and are isolated by the other parties.
• Spirit & NVA: both heirs of the late Volksunie party, that also wanted an independent Flanders. Internal tensions lead to a rift and the formation of the leftist Spirit and the rightist NVA.  Both joined electoral cartels, Spirit with the SP.a and NVA with CD&V.
  
• PvdA: Communists, Dutch speaking
• PdT: Communists, French speaking
• BUB: tiny party devoted to unionism (keeping Belgium united instead of granting Wallonia and Flanders independence). This party is one of the few that is not split among regional lines. It is also one of the few parties that if they ever find a fourth guy could play cards...
• ...
  

In the end it leads to wonderful coalition governments, sometimes even differing on federal and regional levels. For example, Flanders is ruled by a three-party coalition of CD&V, VLD and SP.a, but the federal government consists of four parties: VLD and MR with SP.a and PS.

Basically, the Socialists want to make everything free (health-care, public transport, education...) while the pro-business Liberals want to have a flat-tax (the same percentage for everyone). The Christian Democrats, meanwhile, want respect for values and people.

The end result is mostly that every year the tax man respectfully asks the people for more of their money to fund all the stuff they are getting ‘for free’, thus making (in theory) everybody happy.