Not looking good

Greece, readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear, is still in trouble and, as that great economist, Vicky Pryce put it in today's Evening Standard, this shows that the Eurozone's troubles are not over (did anyone actually believe they were?). In fact,

Stock markets across Europe have been falling as Greek troubles threaten to bring down the whole EU economy.

Ms Pryce ought to realize that there is no such thing as "the whole EU economy" but, clearly, Greece's continuing troubles do not help. Neither do the various other problems:

This time Greece is not alone. There are worries about growth prospects in China, concerns about the struggling Japanese economy, and fears that the decline in the price of oil reflects a slump in demand due to weakening world growth. In the UK, the FTSE 100 was 6.6 per cent down in the week, as energy companies took big hits, with Brent crude falling to $61 a barrel on Friday, less than half the price of $115 a barrel in June this year. Concerns about stagnation and deflation led to widespread falls in stock markets across the eurozone.

With Italy back in recession and France in increasing difficulty, one might imagine Greece’s problems are small by comparison. After all, the country represents no more than two per cent of the eurozone’s GDP. But it has become the symbol of the eurozone’s sustainability.

Greece’s fresh problems have been exacerbated by a return to political instability. Greece had been given an extension of two months to meet its bail-out conditions for the final instalment for its €250 billion loan from the “troika” of the European Central Bank, European Union and IMF. This in turn meant that Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras could not obtain agreement to exit the conditional arrangements of the bail-out package by the end of this year, as Ireland and Portugal have done.

So, a snap presidential election by MPs will happen and the EU is apparently worrying:

EU commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker has warned Greece against electing "extreme forces" into power and said he would prefer "known faces" - so far the strongest intervention of the EU top brass in the Greek campaign.

"I think that the Greeks - who have a very difficult life - know very well what a wrong election result would mean for Greece and the eurozone," Juncker said during an Austrian public tv debate with EUobserver and several other Brussels-based journalists.

He steered clear of explicit political advice ahead of presidential elections in Greece next week but said: "I wouldn't like extreme forces to come to power."

The presidential elections - to be held in the Greek parliament on 17 December - could trigger early parliamentary elections, if there are three failed attempts to elect a president.

Will the Greeks listen to these wise words? Who can tell? Just in case, Pierre Moscovici, the Economics Commissioner has flown to Athens for last minute negotiations:

Moscovici’s visit is meant to focus on reaching agreement on the last economic reforms Greece must make before the final tranche of €1.8 billion from its €240 billion bailout is paid out - however the dynamics of the presidential election are set to take centre stage.

Antonis Samaras’ governing coalition, led by the centre-right New Democracy party, brought forward the presidential elections this month in a bid to stave off early parliamentary elections that it fears could bring the left-wing Syriza opposition to power.

The vote will be held in the Greek parliament on 17 December. It could trigger parliamentary elections, if there are three failed attempts to elect a president.

The government is reliant on the support of several minor parties for its majority and has raised the spectre of Greece being forced out of the eurozone if Syriza takes power.

Meanwhile, things are not looking good in Belgium, either. Indeed, it has been "paralyzed by a general strike".

The entire Belgian airspace is closed on Monday (15 December), as well as high-speed trains from Brussels to London, Paris and Amsterdam and local buses, trams and metro lines, as part of a general strike over public sector cuts.

Schools, government offices and private firms are also likely to be closed on Monday. Garbage will not be picked up and newspapers will not be delivered.

Serious traffic jams are expected around Brussels and Antwerp, with transport trade unions calling on truck drivers to join in and "paralyse the country".

Trade unions already staged a huge march which ended in violent clashes with police a month ago, when the government first announced the plans to save €11 billion over the next five years. The measures include scrapping an automatic indexation of salaries next year and raising the retirement age from 65 to 67 from 2030.

Belgium last month was flagged up together with Italy and France and given time until March to bring its budget in order or face extra scrutiny from the EU commission.

Unlike France, Belgium is sticking to the three-percent budget deficit rule, but its public debt is set to reach 107.8 percent of GDP in 2017, compared to 104.5 percent last year. Under EU rules, countries should keep their public debt below 60 percent of GDP.

If memory serves me right, this kind of thing was not going to happen once the euro was established.

Meanwhile ...

... in Belgium it looks like they might form a government quite soon, though why they should want one is a mystery. They seem to have managed quite well without one or, to be quite precise, without this particular layer of government. I suppose it's one of those of games of "keeping up with the Joneses".

Coalition talks re-start

No, no, no, not our coalition, the Belgian one. Readers may well have forgotten (and I would not blame them) that Belgium still has no formal federal government. In reality it does not matter since decisions are taken either on the regional level or at the level of the real government, which also happens to be in Brussels.

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that the coalitions talks have restarted. At this rate they will manage to put together a federal government just about in time for the next election when the whole farce can start again.

Belgium bans the burqua

The new law is to come into force on July 23. Belgium will be the second EU member state to pass this legislation, the first one being France. As it happens the estimate is that only about 270 people were the niquab or full covering in the country. (Though, their own communities do not consider them as people but as women who do not have the same rights as men and who have to be separated from society.)

Incidentally, Belgium still has no government but seems to be managing as well as ever.

Still no government

One year on Belgium still manages with a caretaker federal government. Not that it matters - there is the other government, also in Brussels.

Meanwhile ... pause for some entertainment

This was sent to me by a reader of the blog who spends a good deal of his time in Brussels. Unfortunately, I cannot understand most of the comments under the video.

Will Belgium survive?

More news from France. Causeur, which is according to one of my correspondents, one of the two best news sites in France (so I had better bookmark it) ran a story, which was then picked up by Le Monde. It seems there was a fairly high-level discussion of experts on Belgium (yes, I am afraid so), including the present and previous French ambassadors, on the future of that country. Undoubtedly, it was to stop this kind of discussion going on that Viscount Palmersong Palmerston [apologies for that egregious error], then Foreign Secretary, actually decided to create the country. I am not sure it was one of his more successful achievements but, perhaps, he never intended it as more than a temporary solution.

Anyway, no agreements have been reached but there are clearly some thoughts among French diplomats and political analysts that Belgium as one country may not survive for long. Of course, the European Union, in theory, does not care whether its member states survive as they are now or whether they break up into contingent parts or regions. That is the theory. But a real break-up, rearrangement, possibly the creation of an even "greater" France will not cheer the colleagues much as nothing is so unpredictable as any change in the accepted internal borders. Who knows where such a change might lead to.

Belgium still in crisis

This is not exactly man bites dog news but I thought readers might like to know that Elio di Rupo, a Socialist leader who was trying to form a coalition government, has resigned.

The king's next step was to ask one representative of each community -- the Francophone speaker of the lower house of parliament, Andre Flahaut of the Socialist Party, and the speaker of the Senate, Danny Pieters of the Flemish separatist party N-VA -- to mediate to restart the talks.

Furthermore, those commenters who insisted that there is a Prime Minister in Belgium, albeit a caretaker one, and his name is Yves Leterme, were right. He has just passed "a bill to cut the budget gap to 4.8 percent of gross domestic product this year, from a previous plan of 5.6 percent". Some good things might come out of this ritual crisis.

Is there a Belgian Prime Minister?

This is not a question that many people spend sleepless nights over, least of all Belgians. However, it seems to have come up a couple of times recently. Yesterday I and other people on a forum were asked how many British people knew who the Belgian Prime Minister was. I replied that nobody knew that as they mostly did not have one but continued in yet another political crisis. Then there was a response from a blog reader to my posting about the State of the Union Address. He said that there were several other Presidents in the EU, including that of the Council of the European Union, which is still a rotating position currently held by Belgium. Therefore, said President was the Belgian Prime Minister, Yves Leterme. To be fair, the reader did admit that he had looked it up. Well, we would all have to look it up.

All the same, I think that is out of date. You have to get up early to get out of bed as Groucho Marx said in the famous auction scene in The Cocoanuts and the same is true for Belgian politics. It would appear from this Wikipedia entry that Yves Leterme was, indeed, the Belgian Prime Minister but resigned in April. This BBC story appears to confirm that: the resignation was accepted by the King on April 26. On the other hand, the King also asked him to stay on in a caretaker capacity, something that seems to happen rather a lot to Belgian politicians.

So what are we to make of this story from Bloomberg?

Elio Di Rupo, the French-speaking Socialist party leader in Belgium, will continue talks aimed at forming a new national government after King Albert II refused to let him give up the mission.

Di Rupo said today that Flemish nationalists and Christian Democrats did not agree to a compromise over finances and regional powers aimed at forming a seven-party national government. Di Rupo then met with the Belgian king at the palace in suburban Brussels.

“Mr. Di Rupo asked the king to be relieved of his mission,” an e-mailed statement from the royal palace said. “The king refused and asked him to continue his mission.” Di Rupo accepted, the statement said.

We should not forget that there was another inconclusive election in June and they are still searching for that elusive government. So there we are: you pays your money and you takes your choice. In the meantime: who is the President of the Council of the European Union?

Meet the next EU President

Or, rather, you cannot meet the next EU President. Belgium is due to take over the rotating presidency on July 1 but it is highly questionable whether it will have a government in place by then. Indeed, despite the Guardian's assurances, there may be no Belgium by then (though I think it will probably survive a little longer). Really, one wonders where that paper gets its commentators. To be fair, a later article in that newspaper pontificates about language being a divisive issue.

Actually, it is considerably more than just about the language or the complexities of the Belgian constitution. The differences between the Flemish and the French sections of the country are becoming so wide as to be almost unbridgeable.

Deutsche Welle analyzes the situation far more coherently and points out the indubitable fact that the Flemish separatist party, the New Flemish Alliance (NVA) actually came top in the poll, naturally doing extremely well in the Flemish part of the country but one would expect that.

Belgium has begun the search for a coalition government after right-wing Flemish separatists won Sunday's parliamentary election. Final official results released by the national electoral commission on Monday show that the New Flemish Alliance (NVA) secured 27 seats in the 150-seat lower house of parliament, up from just eight seats in 2007.

The NVA, led by 39-year-old Bart De Wever, ultimately wants to split the wealthy Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north from Belgium's poorer, French-speaking region of Wallonia in the south. De Wever passionately advocates the end of Belgium, calling its six million Dutch-speakers and 4.5 million Francophones a "hopeless mismatch." Linguistic disputes have long hounded Belgium and dominated the election campaign. But a split-up of Belgium after this election is unlikely.

Probably not, but it the count-down must have started. After all,

Due to linguistic, political and economic differences, Belgium has had four governments and three prime ministers since 2007.

As ever, in Belgium, it is the King's constitutional duty to find some kind of a solution. The man must be getting heartily sick of the whole subject.

Will the burqua be banned?

The Interior Affairs Committee in the Belgian Parliament has unanimously supported a Bill that would ban the burqua in public. The Bill is now going to a full debate and vote, probably before the end of this month. This may be the first step towards a European country actually banning face veils but there is some way to go.

In the meantime, as the Wall Street Journal points out, there seems to be little fuss in Belgium. Most of the Muslims there are from North African countries where women tend not to be veiled (thus making nonsense of the argument that the niquab is in any way a religious symbol).

Catholic bishops came out against the ban, citing freedom of religion, as did Muslim community leaders. But they were unable to muster a strong enough front—indeed, many of them agreed the ban could contribute to integration.

Belgian lawmakers argued that the veils can hide criminals, imprison women and segregate society. (One backer even compared women who wear face veils to dwarfs subjected to dwarf-tossing.) The ban would prohibit face veils in nearly all public places, except for special occasions such as Halloween. Violators could be fined up to €25 and imprisoned for seven days.

The European Commission

said that they were concerned at the move, but initially it was a matter for member states, but they would be watching the issue and examining any bill put before the Belgian lawmakers very closely as it may fall foul of EU anti-discrimination policy.

Well, we wouldn't want to discriminate against people who prefer gender apartheid to freedom and equality.

In France, where most of the Muslim population are also from North Africa, the debate goes on. President Sarkozy, backed by Prime Minister Fillon, has said that the burqua was not welcome in France. However, there has been a set-back to the proposals to ban this all-enveloping garment:

France's highest administrative body warned Tuesday that a total prohibition on full-body Islamic veils in public risks being found unconstitutional in a setback to President Nicolas Sarkozy's goal of an all-out ban.

Even a limited ban on the full-body veil would be difficult to enforce, the Council of State said in a study of the legal possibilities for a broad application of a ban on burqa-like garments that was commissioned by Prime Minister Francois Fillon earlier this year.

A total ban risks violating the French constitution and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the report said.

Once again, one has to wonder at the mentality of people who solemnly proclaim that the depriving Muslim women of basic rights or even of participation in the society around them is somehow an affirmation of human rights.