Why Belgium Cannot Form a Government and Keeps Going Anyway
September 19, 2025 · Frisian News
Belgium has spent months without a functioning government as political parties deadlock over language, budgets, and ideology. The country simply limps forward with a caretaker cabinet, proving that sometimes gridlock works fine.
Belgium's parliament sits in Brussels, hemmed in by three language groups that cannot agree on much of anything. Flemish speakers in the north want more power and lower taxes. Walloon speakers in the south fear losing welfare funds. Brussels itself, officially bilingual but de facto French-speaking, plays kingmaker in a game nobody really wins. After elections in June, parties spent three months talking, then three more months not talking at all. No coalition formed. No government took office. The king kept asking, the politicians kept saying no, and nobody seemed especially upset about it.
The official reason for the impasse sounds technical but cuts deep. Flanders wants to cut spending and decentralize power away from federal Brussels. Wallonia wants the opposite, wanting Brussels to keep controlling money and sending it south. Throw in squabbles over language laws, immigration, energy policy, and whether to raise or lower pensions, and you have a recipe for paralysis. Several far-right and left-wing parties refuse to work with the traditional center parties. The traditional center parties refuse to work with the far-right and far-left. Everyone knows what everyone else wants and knows they cannot have it. So they sit and wait.
What makes this situation odd is that nothing terrible happens. Bills still pass. Budgets get approved at the old rates. Ministers keep their desks and keep working. Belgium runs on a caretaker government staffed by the previous administration's people, and it works adequately. The trains run. Schools open. Hospitals function. A country that cannot form a government proves remarkably durable, at least in the short term. Caretaker cabinets exist precisely for this reason, a brake on the chaos that prevents democracies from seizing up entirely when politicians play chicken.
Belgium's real crisis is structural, not immediate. A caretaker cabinet cannot make new laws, launch new programs, or commit to long-term spending. It treads water. For a few months that feels fine. For a year, it becomes a problem. For two years, it becomes a warning sign that the whole system works only because its parts hate change more than they hate each other. Flanders grows richer and wants out. Wallonia falls behind and wants to stay in. Brussels wants to matter and grows more French every year. Each region trusts the others less than it trusts itself, and the federal level exists only because nobody has figured out how to cut it apart without bleeding.
Some European observers fret that Belgium's dysfunction might spread or set a bad example. More likely, Belgium simply shows what happens when you build a country on compromises that nobody actually believes in anymore. The system holds because inertia is powerful, not because it has legitimacy. The caretaker government will probably limp along until late autumn or early winter, when someone finally cracks and agrees to a coalition that makes nobody happy but lets the government claim it exists. Until then, Belgium proves that a state can govern without governing, a useful lesson for anyone who thinks democracy must be tidy to be real.
Published September 19, 2025 · Frisian News