Francois Lenoir/Reuters
Bart de Wever's Flemish nationalist party won the most parliamentary seats, putting Belgian unity at risk.
By STEPHEN CASTLE and STEVEN ERLANGER
BRUSSELS — The move to break up Belgium gathered pace on Sunday as a separatist won an emphatic election victory in Flanders, the more prosperous Dutch-speaking region of the divided nation.
A stunning electoral success for Bart de Wever’s Flemish nationalist party, which won the most parliamentary seats, is a significant new challenge to the fragile unity of a federal country where tensions between French and Dutch speakers run deep, and where voters in one region cannot vote for parties in the other.
It has also injected a new element of uncertainty into Europe at an especially difficult time for the European Union, struggling with serious problems over its finances and currency.
Belgium is due to assume the rotating presidency of the European Union in less than three weeks. But it is likely to take months to negotiate a new coalition, raising the prospect that Belgium will be struggling to assemble its own government at precisely the time it is supposed to be steering Europe out of a deep crisis.
In 2007, after the last general election, it took the Belgians roughly nine months to form a coalition government, a measure of the centrifugal forces threatening to destroy the already-loose federal state, or to make it even less relevant than it is today.
“We are close to the abyss,” said Lieven de Winter, professor of politics at the Université Catholique de Louvain. “Whether we are five meters or five centimeters away is difficult to say. But Belgians are at a crossroads where they are making a choice on whether they want to live together or not.”
Claiming victory on Sunday evening, Mr. de Wever said that it was too soon for independence, which he favors, for Flanders, the northern part of the country where 60 percent of the population lives. He promised to reach out to French speakers, even as he demanded radical reform of the federal state.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told Belgians. “Have faith in yourselves.”
Mr. de Wever, a 39-year-old political writer, said he would not seek the post of prime minister, which might frighten Francophones, but preferred to concentrate on negotiating “a deal” to reform the state and its finances.
Final results early Monday gave his New Flemish Alliance 27 of the 150 seats in Parliament, a gain of 19 seats, just ahead of the French Socialists, with 26 seats, a gain of six. The Flemish- and French-speaking voters elect different parties, but there is a Flemish Socialist Party as well.
In addition to Mr. de Wever’s party, which got nearly 30 percent of the vote, Flanders gave 12.5 percent of its vote to the far-right separatists of Vlaams Belang and about 4 percent to another populist party, meaning that nearly half of the Flemish electorate voted for separatists. Mr. de Wever’s success appeared to come at the expense of the Christian Democrats of the current prime minister and his Liberal allies.
In French-speaking Wallonia and the capital, Brussels, the French Socialists won about 36 percent of the vote. Their leader, Elio di Rupo, may be asked to become prime minister, which would make him the first Francophone prime minister since 1974.
Perhaps Mr. de Wever’s greatest success has been to make the cause of independence respectable. Other separatist parties like Vlaams Belang were identified with the extremist and xenophobic far-right, which limited their appeal.
By contrast Mr. de Wever is a mainstream politician who argues for the gradual, slow death of Belgium, rather than its immediate dismemberment. “We do not want a revolution,” he said in Brussels last week. “We do not want to declare Flanders independent overnight. But we do believe in a gradual evolution.”
Belgium’s 180-year history contains many of the seeds of today’s difficulties. French-speakers in Wallonia dominated the country for much of the last century. The resentments of Dutch speakers in Flanders, who remember being treated as second-class citizens, run deep. As Wallonia’s traditional industries like coal and steel have declined, the Flemish increasingly feel that they are subsidizing the less productive south.
The parallel political system, in which each region has its own parties, reinforces the divisions. Politicians on either side increasingly have little in common, but have to form a federal coalition anyway.
Though the Czech Republic and Slovakia managed a “velvet divorce” in 1993, such a feat would be more difficult for Belgium, which would have to find a solution for Brussels, a largely French-speaking city that is also the capital of Flanders. Brussels is home to the headquarters of the European Union and of NATO.
While the two regional governments have considerable autonomy, the Flemish parties want to decentralize authority over justice, health, social security, taxation and labor, while the poorer French speakers fear losing federal social security protections.
Few symbols of Belgian unity remain, other than the royal family, the cartoon character Tintin and Brussels itself. There is a national soccer team, but it did not qualify for the World Cup.
