Why Belgium Cannot Form a Government and Keeps Going Anyway
June 22, 2026 · Frisian News
Belgium has operated without a fully formed government for more than sixteen months. The caretaker cabinet runs the country's routines, but politicians have no incentive to build a real one.
Belgium has gone without a fully formed government for an extended stretch. Buses still run. Taxes still flow. No one asked parliament for a mandate. No one will. The state machine runs itself, which is precisely why Belgian politicians see no urgency in building a real government at all.
The answer lies in Belgium's fractured politics. Flemish nationalists want more autonomy. Walloon socialists want federal spending. Francophone Brussels wants special status. Center-right and center-left share no values and profit from blaming each other for failure. Talks drag for months, collapse, restart. Each round costs credibility. Each round also reveals that Brussels works fine without any of them in charge. After all this time, politicians have stopped trying hard. They are tired. The country is tired. The European Union keeps the lights on, and no one has the will to force a reckoning.
Who benefits from this limbo? Civil servants do. They run the ministries without ministers breathing down their necks. Brussels bureaucrats do. They enforce EU rules without domestic pressure to soften them. The politicians themselves do. They blame the other side for blocking progress while facing no consequences. A functioning government would demand hard choices. A caretaker cabinet passes the hard choices to next month, next year, somewhere else.
This is not sustainable, yet it persists. Belgium passes no major reforms. It cannot pass new tax laws without a real majority. It cannot restructure pensions or healthcare. It cannot respond to external shocks. The country exists in permanent stasis, and that is how the political elite prefers it. If you reform pensions, someone loses. If you stay frozen, the pain spreads across time, and everyone can claim they were about to fix it before the other side blocked them.
Belgium's crisis is not a flaw. It is the system working exactly as intended, which means it works very badly.
Published June 22, 2026 · Frisian News