Belgium has a prime minister who tried to quit, a king who would not let him, and a budget nobody can agree on.
Bart De Wever offered his resignation to King Philippe on Monday morning, after the broad coalition he leads failed to settle on roughly €10 billion in budget cuts. The palace refused to take it. By Friday, the king had asked the coalition to keep talking, and the government remained in office.
The palace statement was blunt. The king "regrets the lack of an agreement to provide the country with a credible budget" and said that "in light of the large geopolitical uncertainty and severe economic challenges, the country can't afford a long political crisis".
Party leaders then went in and out of the palace for closed-door talks, watched by reporters and a few curious Brussels residents. De Wever returned to the king on Friday morning to report on the result.
Caroline Sägesser, a researcher at the Brussels think tank CRISP, reads the episode as a managed piece of political theatre. "The prime minister and the king are betting on the fact that political leaders will find it more difficult to say no to the king than to the prime minister," she said. It is also new. Belgian kings normally play this role only after elections. De Wever used the palace to win more time on the budget last year as well.
The disagreement is about money. De Wever has stressed that Belgium's debt burden and the interest bill that comes with it are unsustainable. His coalition partners disagree on how to close the gap, while protests demanding more social spending keep rolling. Belgium has never been short of political drama, but it is short of fiscal room, and ratings agencies are watching. Scope was due to announce its decision on the country's credit rating on Friday evening.
Belgians know how bad this can get. In 2010 the country went 541 days without a government. That memory is a large part of why the king, and most of the parties, want the current row closed fast.
There are three ways out. The parties find a compromise, De Wever reshapes his coalition to make one possible, or the country heads to snap elections. Sägesser expects the king to hold on to the resignation, because few leaders want to be seen telling him no. But a deal reached under royal pressure is still a deal on €10 billion of cuts, and each partner has to sell it at home. For the EU, which expects member states to bring deficits down, a Belgian collapse would remove a steady, if unglamorous, voice from the Council at a bad moment. The next few days will show whether the palace can do what the coalition could not.
