Wednesday, May 11, 2011

4PM Moving to Belgium?

Belgium still doesn’t have a government, meaning it has broken the record set by Iraq for most consecutive days following an election without a coalition government. This has been going on for almost an entire year now. The problem is that Belgium is a country split into two relatively equal groups who don’t even speak the same language with a third around just to mess things up. The funny thing is that even though there’s all this incapacity, life in Belgium pretty much hasn’t changed. So much of the governing functions have been de-centralized to the local governments that all the basic services still run and the inability to form a central government is beginning to look more and more like a non-necessity altogether. According to this story:

Dan Alexe, a Romanian-born Belgian film-maker said: ‘The trains and buses still run. The police are still operating. The post is late, but then it always was late. Maybe having 'no government' is preferable to having governments which collapse all the time.”

There are occasional protests over the failure, but these seem to be more tongue-in-cheek or reasons-for-a-party more than anything else. Tea Party Belgium, anyone?

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