We are the champions !!! (Belgium)

I don't know if it was in the news yesterday or today around the world but Belgium has a new world record....

249 days after the elections we still have no new gouvernement, we surpassed the netherlands a while ago for the European record and now we also surpassed Iraq.

Maybe a good moment to put some things straight.

We are NOT without gouvernement for 249.

\* We still have the old in place and new parliament is supporting it, so it can function like it should. Moreover regarding the economy Belgium is, apart from Germany, being best gouverned through the crisis last year and we are doing better than what Europe demands.

\* The victory in the elections on the Flemish (dutch speaking) part (which is a slight majority of belgium) was NOT for an extreme right party (as the Walloon press sometimes tries to communicate and since foreigners can understand French better than Dutch this goes around the world), but it is democratic separistic party, which makes negociations hard.

\* The long negociations are due to the fact ALL that parties want to change the state structure where the different states would get more responsibilities than the others.

Well, lucky you! I'm sure if you really put some effort into it, you can make it a full year! :-)

Great Britain will be hopeing to beat your record when we hold our next general election in a few years time, that is if we vote yes to the alternative vote system this spring.

In fact I was amazed that in June, when the UK and Belgium both had elections there was such a fuzz in London that there was need for coalition talks and that it lasted more than a few hours. BBC-World (which I try to listen daily) journalists were close to panicking.

In fact we are used to the real representation system and find the american (and I think you have similar in Great Britain) less democratic. Bush once got a absolute majority while getting 24% of the votes, and not even have most votes (that is considering the official counting, in the real counting he even had less votes, but wouldn't have won). That is plainly ridiculous.

Sadly, Bush had about half the votes cast. The 24% is of eligible voters, about half of whom didn't vote.