[ Contents | Nederlands | Esperanto | Previous | Up | Next ]

6.1. Constituency

A reason why the French-speaking could get a hold of the border around Brussel, is that they also have had the possibility to vote for the French-speaking politicians at elections. Even now, they still can vote for Walloon parties at European or senate elections in the district of Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde. In parliamentary elections, they can vote for the French-speaking parties of Brussel. They cannot vote any more for the parliament of the French community or the Walloon parliament, but they have their own party, the UF, in the Flemish parliament. The UF is also represented in the provincial council of Vlaams-Brabant.

Violation of the Language Laws?

The French-speaking, living in the border around Brussel, have the right to have a party representing them, but it is not reasonable that the whole of the district gets a voting-paper with French-speaking/Walloon parties because of a small minority of immigrants. Moreover, the language laws were violated, since bilingual voting-papers had to be counted in strictly monolingual Ducth-speaking communes, namely the counting stations of Zaventem, Wolvertem and Halle, at the elections for the senate on May 21st, 1995.

Finally, for the European elections, the Belgian seats are divided over the communities in a fixed way. However, this is in contradiction to the fact that French-speaking representatives can be elected by votes from an area the French community has no jurisdiction over.

Scission of the District

The scission of the district of Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde is a very old demand of the Flemish movement. But since the scission of the unitarian province of Brabant, this twisting of Brussel and Halle-Vilvoorde has become completely undefendable. Nevertheless, a lot of Flemings think that a scission of the district might turn out to be disadvantageous for the Flemish inhabitants of Brussel. They fear they won't get as many representatives elected as they do now. Research has shown that this is not necessarily true.

In June 1996, the Vlaams Blok proposed to split the district asymmetrically. The Vlaams Blok would like to see that the district would we split up for the French parties, whereas the Flemish parties would continue to see just one district. In this manner, the Flemish votes from Brussel wouldn't be lost, but the French votes from the border would lose a lot of their weight.


© Filip van Laenen ( f.a.vanlaenen@ieee.org )