A Separatist Revolution Percolates in Belgium

Is 177-year-old Belgium -- renowned for its chocolate, waffles and beer -- really in danger of being erased from the map of Europe?

"What we considered unthinkable and fictional has now become thinkable," said B¿atrice Delvaux, editor of the Walloon newspaper Le Soir. "The Walloons are like a wife who's scared that her husband may leave her."

In a recent poll for the newspaper La Libre Belgique, about 40 percent of all Flemings and Walloons said they believe Belgium will not exist in another decade.

When the French-language RTBF television network aired a spoof news bulletin last year announcing that Flanders had declared independence, Belgium had been dissolved and the king had fled, thousands of panic-stricken Walloons flooded the station with calls. Yves Thiran, the head of news programming, said at the time, "Our intention was to show Belgian viewers the intensity of the issue and the real possibility of Belgium no longer being a country."

Flemish separatist parties have made significant gains in local, regional and national parliamentary elections in recent years. The most radical of them -- the Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, party -- now holds 25 percent of the seats in the Flemish parliament.

"What has happened in the last few months is an enormous trigger," Frank Vanhecke, one of the right-wing, pro-independence party's top leaders, said of the lack of a national government. "Independence has become a reasonable and realistic possibility. This revolution can't be stopped."

Vanhecke's party has been ostracized by other Flemish parties, who consider it too radical as well as racist and anti-Islamic, and Vanhecke was arrested at an anti-Islam rally in Brussels last week. But even moderate Flemish politicians are embracing the issue of Flemish independence, or autonomy to the point of near-independence.

After general elections on June 10, the king turned to Yves Leterme -- leader of the Flemish Christian Democrats, who won the highest number of Dutch electoral college votes in the national Senate races -- in hopes of finding a unifying political voice for the government.

But Leterme proved anything but a unifying figure. He created a political uproar when he told the French newspaper Liberation that Belgium was "an accident of history." And he criticized the king for not speaking Dutch well enough.

Leterme further enraged many Belgians when a television reporter asked him to sing a verse from the Belgian national anthem and he instead sang lines from the French national anthem.

Vermeiren, the former bank president, is the lead author of the 252-page "Manifesto for an Independent Flanders Within Europe," and he and his fellow revolutionaries have been meeting for several years in a De Warande club back room. Vermeiren believes the breakup of Belgium, though not imminent, is inevitable and discusses it as matter-of-factly as he might the sale of an unprofitable corporation.

"We have seven parliaments and six governments for a country of 10 million inhabitants," he said, as a waiter in a black suit and starched white shirt set a glass of cold water on a table.

The Flemings and the Walloons have never gotten along well. A formal linguistic border has separated the two regions for half a century, and there are no national political parties to bridge the gulf.

Each side has its own autonomous parliament, political parties, schools, newspapers, television stations, celebrities, Boy Scouts and pigeon-racing clubs.

"Now there's a new generation on each side, and they don't know each other," said Pierre Vercauteren, a political scientist at Catholic University in Mons. "It has complicated negotiations because they don't have a common knowledge and can't reach a compromise."

The French-speakers of Wallonia, a name some translate as land of valleys, dominated both politics and the economy in Belgium for decades. The south's coal reserves and steel industries fueled national prosperity while the Flemish region in the north remained largely agricultural.

In recent years, the regions' fortunes have been reversed. The Flemish are in the majority with about 58 percent of the population, and their economy has exploded with high-tech companies and international trade, while the south is languishing with obsolete factories, high unemployment and an expensive welfare state.

Vermeiren, like many Flemings, said he is tired of having his taxes and his region's revenue going to support economically backward Wallonia. By just about every economic measure he has studied, from income taxes to traffic fines, Flanders generates more revenue than Wallonia. The Walloons, he said, siphon off far more than their fair share of national funds.

The Flemings are demanding more autonomy over their budget and governance. The Walloons, anxious about being on the losing end, refuse to give in.

And what if Belgium does cease to exist as a country?

Vanhecke, the Flemish Interest party leader, shrugged and said he doesn't believe the world will miss it.

"Who cares?" he said.

Anderson and researcher Corinne Gavard reported from Paris.