Told you so...(*)
Belgians agree on one issue: foreigners
By Dan Bilefsky
Published: October 9, 2007
BRUSSELS This 177-year-old nation came a step closer Tuesday to averting breakup after its squabbling linguistic communities managed to agree on the one issue that increasingly unites them: fear of immigrants.
Belgium, divided between Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south, has spent 120 days since national elections without a new government. Political parties have been unable to agree on the country's direction, and fears are growing that Belgium will dissolve. Yet signs of a breakthrough in the coalition talks emerged Tuesday morning when the Christian Democrats and Liberals temporarily put aside their differences and agreed on a tough new approach to asylum policy and economic migration.
Despite this agreement, political analysts stressed that the crisis was far from over with the important issue of how to grant more autonomy to Flanders and Wallonia still hanging in the balance. They underlined, however, that the deal illustrated how immigration had become a unifying issue in a country where the prime minister-in-waiting recently publicly fumbled the words of the national anthem and where the unifying force for Belgians of all linguistic stripes is a love of the country's 400 kinds of beer.
"A toughening stance on immigration has overtaken politics in Belgium and made immigration a swing issue, and we are seeing this across Europe," said Pierre Blaise, secretary general of Crisp, a sociopolitical research organization in Brussels. "It is not that Belgians are intolerant in general, but rather that the radicalization of the right has pushed mainstream parties to adopt a tougher approach when it comes to immigration and attitudes toward Islam in particular."
Political analysts said the provisional deal, which will only come into effect if parties form a government, reflected the extent to which the Vlaams Belang, an extreme-right Flemish party that argues against Muslim immigration to Belgium and wants an independent Flanders, was influencing the political debate. Its leader, Filip Dewinter, whose well-coifed appearance and far-right politics recall Jörg Haider of Austria, founder of the anti-immigrant Freedom Party, has suggested "repatriation" for immigrants who do not make greater efforts to integrate.
Under the agreement, migrants from outside the European Union will be able to come to fill jobs only if there are not enough EU candidates. The parties agreed to stricter rules for immigrants who want to join family members in Belgium, including proof that they have sufficient income. The accord also would reserve Belgian citizenship to those who have spent five years uninterrupted in the country and who speak one of Belgium's three official languages - French, Dutch or German.
An increasingly strident stance toward immigration has been seen across Europe, where a get-tough approach to immigrants has been winning votes. In Switzerland, where voters go to the polls in national elections on Oct. 21, the Swiss People's Party, the most powerful party in Parliament, has in recent days been distributing posters showing three white sheep standing in the Swiss flag, as one of them kicks a single black sheep away. The implicit message: Foreigners are not welcome in one of the world's oldest democracies.
In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected on a law-and-order platform of tightening illegal immigration. He has set up a Ministry for Immigration and National Identity and supports legislation requiring immigrants who want to bring families to France to undergo DNA testing to prove that these are their relatives. Sarkozy, a former interior minister, also has vowed to deport 25,000 illegal immigrants by the end of 2007.
So strong is the fear that Dutch values of tolerance are under siege by immigrants that the government two years ago introduced a primer on Dutch values for prospective newcomers to Dutch life: a DVD briefly showing topless women and two men kissing.[**] The message: Embrace our culture - or go home.
In Belgium, the policies toward illegal immigration came under attack by human rights groups this summer after Belgian authorities detained an 11-year-old Ecuadorian girl, Angelica, and her mother, Ana Cajamarca, who had overstayed their tourist visas by four years. Plans to deport the two sparked a public outcry because the girl had attended a Belgian primary school and her father planned to remain in the country. Many also criticized the detention of a minor.
A court eventually ordered their release, just hours before the scheduled deportation, after widespread media coverage and a campaign by Anne Malherbe, the Belgian wife of Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, who likened their treatment to Nazism.
Some analysts cautioned that the provisional agreement Tuesday should not be construed as a national anti-immigrant backlash, but rather as a pragmatic attempt to overcome the current impasse. They noted that while fears of immigration were increasingly transcending linguistic and ideological divisions, an extreme-right nationalist movement had yet to make serious inroads in the French-speaking half of Belgium. Meantime, a vocal minority in the Social Democratic party, one of the French-speaking parties trying to form a government, had challenged the agreement, while the business community had successfully lobbied in favor of making it easier to admit highly skilled foreign workers.
The party of the Flemish Christian Democrat leader Yves Leterme and the Liberals, each split into Dutch and French-speaking parties, won a majority in the June elections. But the country has been mired in deadlock because the Flemish parties have been pushing for greater regional autonomy, while their Francophone rivals have been clinging to national solidarity.
Beyond the specter of seeing a fragile federal state unravel, the impasse has global implications because Brussels, the Belgian capital, is host to the European Union, the world's biggest trading bloc, as well as to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Should the Flemish succeed in gaining greater autonomy for Flanders, Brussels, an 85 percent Francophone island surrounded by Dutch-speaking Flanders, could find itself in the center of a linguistic tug of war between competing regions. That could make it an uncomfortable home for international organizations whose main purpose is forging European and transatlantic unity.
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