Not in the Paper
From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Sun, 2006-09-10 13:14
I fail to understand why David Rennie’s stories on the divisions within Belgium are not in the main paper. I believe Belgium is coming apart at the seams because of the ludicrous D’Hondt rules [a method for allocating seats in party-list proportional representation] making multi-party coalitions in the central government unworkable, so that to avoid the kind of situation that D’Hondt has caused in Northern Ireland, ergo no parliament at all, the government pushes dissent and dissenters downward and outward. The former country of two halves now has nearly a dozen regional parliaments or community councils, and poses a serious threat to the stability of the European Union, not to mention the other giant tenants in Brussels, the EU parliament and NATO.