What enables Wallonia to block formation of a government is a parliamentary system where Flanders and Wallonia must each assent to any government. Which means that half of the Walloons, 20 percent of Belgium's population, holds veto power over a national government.
Not only is the parliamentary situation becoming intolerable to Flanders, there is rage over the recent socialist government's having brought in French-speaking North Africans to give Walloons control of Brussels, which, though in Flanders, has a French-speaking majority.
Heightening the tensions, on Sept. 11, a demonstration was held in Brussels to protest "the Islamization of Europe," featuring a moment of silence for the victims of 9-11. There, as Washington Times columnist Diana West describes the videotape, "we see black-clad Belgian policemen brutalizing a man in a light-colored suit and tie. His hands are cuffed behind his back, his right elbow is clasped in what is known as an arm-bar hold, and he is being subjected to a genital hold -- a vicious grip that, a retired cop friend of mine tells me, would get any American policeman thrown off the force."
The victim of this police brutality was Frank Vanhecke, president of the Flemish secessionist party Vlams Belang and a member of the European Parliament. Also arrested and beaten was Filip Dewinter, the leading politician of Vlams Belang, which is Belgium's largest opposition party. This is like having Mitch McConnell beaten up and arrested at a rally on the Washington Mall to protest illegal immigration.
Seemingly condoning what was done to the Vlams Belang leaders, Terry Davis, the secretary general of the Council of Europe, issued a statement declaring, "The freedom of expression and freedom of assembly are indeed preconditions for democracy, but they should not be regarded as a license to offend."
Are offensive ideas and speech now verboten in the European Union?
While European and U.S. leftists regard Dewinter, Vanhecke and Vlams Belang as crypto-fascist, as West writes, it was the police conduct that might better be described as "The New Face of Fascism" in Europe. Moreover, West and I have met both men, and neither was wearing jackboots. What they seek is what many Americans seek: the preservation of their country and their unique national identity.
If a party of small-government immigration reformers and defenders of Europe's unique culture, heritage and identity can be subjected to such treatment by Belgian police and Europe's elite, we have to ask: Just how democratic is this new European Union, when its own ideology of multiculturalism is challenged by the people in whose name it presumes to speak?
Has the European Union become an enemy of the people it rules?