Belgium Went 589 Days Without an Elected Government

On June 13, 2010, Belgians elected eleven parties to a 150-seat Chamber. The largest, the Flemish-nationalist N-VA, took 27 seats. The next, the Francophone Socialists, took 26. Nobody had close to a majority, and the country's two halves did not want the same coalition.

What followed was 541 days of formation talks. Yves Leterme stayed on as caretaker. On June 1, 2011, Belgium tied Cambodia's 2003 record of 353 days to form a government after an election. It kept going. The cabinet under Elio Di Rupo was finally sworn in on December 6, 2011 — 589 days after the previous government had resigned.

The sticking point was a single electoral district: Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde. Brussels is officially bilingual, but the suburbs around it sit in Flanders, where Dutch is the only official language. The district let Francophones living in those Flemish suburbs vote for French-speaking parties on the Brussels list — a small carve-out that Flemish parties had spent years trying to close, and Francophone parties had spent years protecting. The Constitutional Court had already ruled the arrangement had to change. Nobody could agree on the price.

Of the 541 negotiating days, 486 were spent on state reform. The deal that finally emerged, the Sixth State Reform, split Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde, moved roughly seventeen billion euros of competencies to the regions, restructured the Senate, and locked in a nuclear phaseout. The coalition needed eight parties to pass it.

During the gap, federal services kept running on the previous year's budget. Trains moved. Garbage was collected. Belgium hosted the EU rotating presidency for six months without a sitting government. The lesson, mostly, is how much of a modern state runs on autopilot — and how little of that autopilot has anything to do with who won the last election.