That in Belgium and France they are four days long? ;-)
Who's this "We"? I never had pets, apart from the occasional goldfish won at a fair.
Pleasant surprise from my webhoster this morning. E-mail in my inbox: "We just trippled your storage space and added some extra bandwith to your monthly allotment. For free.".
That brings me to 75 gig storage and 600 gig transfer per month... for €7,5 per month (less, actually, since I paid for two years in advance and got some free months).
Thank you, Servage.net!
(And yes, you can run Movable Type on it)
I don't know what to write about on my comet blog at the moment, so I'll write about the weather. Seems like spring has come to Belgium: the decorative shrub in front of my office window is becoming green again, and the first flowers are peeking up in the garden. Nice!
Only two days ago I still thought season two was just the regular 12 episodes. But then I discovered a blog post somewhere talking about 20 episodes. I rechecked and discovered I had missed eight ones!
On another note (wink): downloading 6.93 gigabytes takes a long time...
Yesterday the DHL delivery van stopped in front of my house and brought a full box of ThinkGeek.com goodness... I am now wearing part of the contents of the box...
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.
Okay, what more can I write about the funny little country I live in? The one thing that never ceases to amaze foreigners when I tell them about it, is how Belgium is organized politically.
Basically, we are a federal state, with a constitutional monarchy. Sounds straightforward enough, no? But it gets complicated: Belgium has had a long history of language-related problems between French speakers and Dutch speakers. This resulted in the creation of ‘regions’ and ‘communities’. A ‘region’ is a territorial entity with it’s own institutions, and is responsible for ‘territorial’ matters (roads, infrastructure, agriculture...). A ‘community’ is a linguistic entity, and is responsible for ‘personal’ matters (education, culture...).
So, if you are counting, that makes for three regions and three communities. Three regions? Indeed: Brussels, the capital, is territorially an enclave of Dutch-speaking Flanders. But since the majority of the population in Brussels speaks French, a Belgian solution was found, and they made the city and nineteen surrounding communities into a full-fledged region (with a government, parliament, the whole shebang, on top of the twenty mayors and city councils). And there are three communities: don’t forget the tiny German-speaking minority!
For example, a French speaker in Brussels drives on roads built and maintained by the Brussels region and goes to schools maintained by the French community. But the Flemish speaker next door goes to Flemish community/region schools (using the same roads). And they both pay federal taxes (part of which is then given to the communities/regions).
So, for a population of ten million, that makes seven governments and parliaments. Don’t forget: there is also the Federal level, just like in the U.S. But seven is too much, even for Belgian standards. That is why the Flemish community and region were fused into one entity. This left Belgium with only six governments and parliaments to cope with its legislative needs.
To address the looming shortage of enough laws and legislation, a bid was made to make Brussels the capital of the European Union. And lucky us! It worked! Now we’ll never have to fear a red tape shortage ever again!
Join us in the exiting next episode of Belgium for Beginners, where I explain the many and multicoloured political parties thriving in these unique institutions...
The best present I ever received was when the Comet team changed the Question of the Day... What? That hasn't happened yet?! Nevermind then...
