For 541 days between 2010 and 2011, Belgium had no government. Bins were collected. Schools opened. Soldiers deployed to Libya. By the time King Albert II swore in Elio Di Rupo's six-party cabinet on 6 December 2011, the country had broken Iraq's previous world record by nearly a year, and Guinness — after a brief debate over whether peacetime governmental absence even merited a category — gave Belgium the certificate it never wanted [1][5]. Less than a decade later, the machinery seized again: 494 days of negotiations after the May 2019 election, ended only by Covid forcing the parties to pretend they liked each other [9]. A country of 11.8 million people [3] whose first constitutional article declares it "a federal State, composed of communities and regions" [6] keeps proving that the second half of that sentence is the part that actually governs.
Why does forming a Belgian government take so long?
Belgian elections do not produce winners; they produce arithmetic problems. The country has no national parties. The Flemish vote in Dutch and the Walloons vote in French, choosing from separate slates that meet only afterwards in coalition rooms. In the 2010 federal election, the Flemish nationalist N-VA won 27 seats and the Walloon Socialist Party (PS) won 26 — and because no Belgian party can legitimately speak for both halves of the country, a working majority required at least six of the eleven parties that cleared the threshold to agree [1].
The numbers are only the beginning. By 2010 the agenda had narrowed to two long-running grievances. Flemish parties wanted Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde — a peculiar electoral district straddling bilingual Brussels and surrounding monolingual Dutch-speaking municipalities — split, because French-speakers in the Flemish periphery could vote for Brussels-based francophone parties while no symmetric right existed in Wallonia [4]. The Walloons wanted any reform packaged with continued federal transfer payments to the poorer south. Why was BHV constitutionally toxic?The Constitutional Court had ruled the BHV arrangement unconstitutional in 2003, citing unequal voting rights — but successive governments failed to fix it because every proposed split was rejected by francophone parties as a loss of cultural protection for French-speakers in the Flemish periphery. The asymmetry was real: French-speakers living in monolingual Dutch-speaking Halle-Vilvoorde could vote for French-language parties, whereas Dutch-speakers living in monolingual French-speaking Walloon Brabant could not vote for Dutch-language parties. The eventual 2012 split, signed by King Albert II on 19 July 2012, merged Halle-Vilvoorde with Leuven into a single Flemish Brabant constituency while making Brussels its own constituency. Six "facility communes" around the capital retained the right to choose between Brussels and Flemish Brabant lists — a compromise that satisfied no one and survived only because nobody had a better one [4].
So 2010 wasn't really a coalition negotiation. It was a constitutional convention conducted by exhausted party leaders, cycling through informateurs, pre-formateurs and formateurs — Bart De Wever, Didier Reynders, Johan Vande Lanotte, Wouter Beke, Elio Di Rupo — each appointed by the king with a different mandate to break a different lock [1]. The eventual deal, the Sixth State Reform, devolved €17 billion in competencies to the regions and finally split BHV [4].
How does a country function with no cabinet?
The short answer is that Belgium had already prepared for this — and had been preparing since 1970.
When Yves Leterme resigned on 26 April 2010, the king asked his cabinet to stay on as a caretaker government — lopende zaken in Dutch, affaires courantes in French, "current affairs only." The conventions are spelled out in a two-page circular issued the day Leterme's resignation was accepted, and despite their plain-text simplicity they are legally enforceable: Belgium's Council of State can and does annul administrative acts that exceed caretaker scope [7].
In practice, the constraint stretched. The Leterme caretaker cabinet sent F-16s to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya, signed off on Belgium's contribution to the European Stability Mechanism, and — uniquely in the history of Belgian caretaker governments — passed a full annual budget [7]. Why was a caretaker cabinet allowed to do all that?Caretaker conventions in Belgium are unwritten constitutional custom rather than codified law. The boundary between "current affairs" and "ordinary government" is renegotiated case-by-case, with parliament, the Council of State, and political opinion as the arbiters. During the 2010-2011 stretch, parliament remained in session and could pass legislation under its own authority — including the budget the caretaker cabinet would not, on its own initiative, have proposed. The Libya mission was justified as urgent and time-sensitive, falling within caretaker scope. The European bailout commitments were defended as honoring pre-existing treaty obligations. The 2019-2020 Vivaldi formation under Alexander De Croo eventually produced a similarly stretched pattern: a Wilmès caretaker cabinet was granted full emergency powers in March 2020 to manage the early Covid response, blurring the line between caretaker and crisis government in ways that scholars now describe as Belgium's "new normal." By the end of the 541 days in 2011, the same scholars were already arguing that "current affairs" had become a euphemism for "government by another name."
But the deeper reason Belgium kept moving had nothing to do with the federal cabinet at all. The six state reforms between 1970 and 2014 had systematically transferred almost everything that touches a citizen's daily life away from the federal level [2]. Education belongs to the language communities. Health, housing, transport, employment, and economic affairs belong to the regions. Police, justice, social security, and defence remain federal — but social security agreements are largely managed by trade unions and employer organizations under permanent statutory mandates. As one Belgian commentator observed during the 2011 deadlock: "In the sixties the people were agitated, but politics was serene. Nowadays politics is agitated but the people remain serene" [7].
What is the difference between a community and a region?
Most federations slice their territory once. Belgium slices it twice along orthogonal axes, producing a constitutional architecture genuinely difficult to draw on a single map.
The three regions are territorial: Flanders in the north, Wallonia in the south, and the Brussels-Capital Region as a 161-square-kilometre island inside Flanders. They handle economic affairs — infrastructure, environment, employment, urban planning — the things that depend on geography [6].
The three communities are personal: the Flemish, French, and German-speaking communities. They handle culturally-mediated matters — education, language policy, broadcasting. A community follows its members, not its borders. The French Community runs schools in Wallonia and in Brussels; the Flemish Community runs schools in Flanders and in Brussels; in Brussels itself, both operate side by side, and a parent chooses [6].
The seam between the two systems is the linguistic frontier, drawn definitively by the language laws of 8 August 1962 and 2 August 1963. Before 1962 the border could move every ten years by royal decree based on census results; after 1963, it could only be changed by a special-majority law, which in practice means it cannot be changed at all [8]. Why was fixing the border so important?Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the linguistic border drifted southward as French — the language of administration, of the upper bourgeoisie, and of Brussels — encroached on Dutch-speaking regions. By the 1930s, decennial censuses had become political flashpoints, with each side accusing the other of manipulating returns. Fixing the border in 1962-63 was a peace treaty: Flanders accepted permanent loss of historically Flemish municipalities that had become majority francophone (notably the so-called "facility communes" around Brussels — Linkebeek, Wezembeek-Oppem, Kraainem, Drogenbos, Wemmel and Sint-Genesius-Rode — where French-speakers retained municipal-service rights but no longer voted in francophone constituencies after 2012), and Wallonia accepted that the line would never advance further. Brussels itself was carved out as a bilingual exception — and immediately became its own permanent quarrel, since the city had been historically Dutch-speaking and was now overwhelmingly francophone. Today the four linguistic regions — monolingual Flanders, monolingual Wallonia, bilingual Brussels, and the small German-speaking area in the east — are constitutional facts, not administrative conveniences [8].
Why does a country this complicated host the EU?
Brussels was not chosen as the de facto capital of Europe because it was easy. It was chosen because nobody else could be trusted with it. When the European Coal and Steel Community needed a seat in the 1950s, France, Germany and the United Kingdom would not accept a city in any of the others. Brussels — halfway between them, in a country small enough to be unthreatening and federal enough to be fluent in compromise — was the residue [12]. NATO followed in 1967 after France withdrew from the integrated military command and ejected the alliance from Paris; the new headquarters was built in six months and inaugurated on 16 October 1967 [10]. SHAPE, NATO's operational command, sits in Mons.
The result is the strangest civic geography in Europe. Brussels is officially bilingual, but more than 80% of its day-to-day life happens in French. Its 1.2 million residents elect a regional parliament with 17 Dutch-speaking seats and 72 French-speaking ones, each requiring its own majority [7]. Roughly 4,000 NATO staff and tens of thousands of EU functionaries work in a city that, on paper, belongs to a country whose own federal government is sometimes a hypothetical [10][13]. The Belgians have a word for the resulting condition: surréalisme. They invented it.
Is this sustainable?
The 2024 federal election produced N-VA's Bart De Wever as the largest party for the first time, and after a 236-day formation he was sworn in as Belgium's first Flemish-nationalist prime minister on 3 February 2025, leading the so-called "Arizona coalition" — orange, yellow, red and blue, like the U.S. state's flag — of N-VA, Christian democrats, Vooruit, MR, and Les Engagés [11]. By Belgian standards, this counts as expeditious.
But the structural pressure has not relaxed. The Flemish nationalist project has moved from the margins to the prime minister's office without resolving the question that produced it: whether a country invented in 1830 as a buffer state — and re-invented six times since 1970 — can keep functioning as a single federation when one of its halves no longer believes in the project. The IPS analyst Jan Cornillie noted, after 2010-11, that the federal-level paralysis carried real cost: "much-needed reforms, on pensions and labour markets, on renewables and on asylum and migration were put on ice" [7]. Belgium did not fall apart during 541 days without a government. But it also did not move.
The country's distinctive achievement is not that it can run without a cabinet. It is that it has built an institutional architecture in which running without a cabinet has become a recognizable mode of government — neither emergency nor normality, but a third condition the rest of the parliamentary world does not have a word for.