The Mooresie

‘Belgium? Something that does not exist’ Political fault lines divide nation | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

[…] There is not a single national politician or leader (bar King Albert) or a single national political party that straddles the linguistic and cultural north-south divide between Flanders and the southern region of francophone Wallonia.

“I don’t know any federal state where you don’t have national parties. Here the parties are purely local,” says André Sapir, head of the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. “We are a federal state, but we have less and less of a common political framework.”