Belgium Crisis Explained: the kingdom in three parts

4. The Flemish: what makes their Sammy run?
800.000 Flemish are supposed to have voted for the extremist right. Those are protest votes of people being disappointed by politics in general rather than craving for an independent Flanders.
Next are the nationalists. A lot of their leaders are former members of extreme right. Nationalists have a strong believe that Flanders would be better of without Wallonia. Their most common objection is that the south takes profit of the hard working north. They don’t want to take this in account as a form of solidarity. Recent fraud-scandals concerning socialist politicians in Wallonia have enhanced that opinion or rather the perception. Perception is a stronger weapon than opinion: make believe is stronger than incite reasoning.
Extremist and Nationalist politicians are confectioning the truth out of the clichés.
Notice that we are speaking about extremists and nationalist. The silent majority of Flemish
Doesn’t necessarily agree with this reluctant strive for independence. The same can be told about the silent majority of Walloons.
Conclusion: one could only hope both were not silent.

5. The Walloons: what triggers their aversion towards Dutch & Flemish?
The French speaking population of Wallonia and Brussels is transferring a difficult period in their existence. Not only they suffer from the industrial decline but also they feel that the French cultural hegemony is over. On the one hand they are in a period of economical conversion but they notice that their domestic servants and even their children speak more languages than themselves. Of course they encourage bilingualism and the knowledge of English and Spanish but it is hard to admit that French is no longer a world language. Their firm believe that Brussels is a 95 percent French speaking town is contradicted by all the different languages they are confronted with on the street (amongst others Arabic). They confound mother tongue and occasional language. And that is what triggers their aversion towards Dutch.
While Flemish nationalists focus on territory, Walloon nationalists focus on language. Strangely enough they believe that “the language is the essence of the nation”, a slogan the Flemish nationalists left behind in the twentieth century. Flemish excel in apprehending foreign languages. Still in the midst of the sixties the Walloon Indepence Movement proclaimed that Belgium was born out of a revolution against Holland and the Dutch language and that obliging bilingualism was a form of treason. (Under the Dutch reign the official language in Belgium was French!).
Conclusion: you’ll never make a brotherhood out of extremism and frustration.
(to be continued)