Nobody forced Leterme to try and interfere with the judicial process over the Fortis/BNP Paribas deal; nobody forced him to keep changing his own story about what had happened; it was entirely his own choice.

Likewise, nobody drove Leterme to set impossible goals for a coalition deal last year, and nobody forced him to try and hardwire them into the negotiations by using the Flemish parliament. That made it almost impossible to put the government together, but that was the result of Leterme’s choice to prioritise political grandstanding ahead of the notion of governing the country.

Belgium does have a rather obscure and foggy political landscape, which is unusually difficult to navigate. But Leterme appeared incapable not only of reading the map, but even of getting it unfolded. He seemed to think that the fact that voters had given it to him should be enough. It wasn’t.

I see he has declared that he will not be seeking to return to government for the time being. Good.

Also, what you now have in Belgium is not just increasing instability and chaos, but also the increasing price that comes with it. Right now what any country needs is a government capable of doing what is needed (and possible, of course) to counter the economic downturn and minimize the damage from the global financial crisis – and if a country has an ineffective government, it is clearly not going to do a good job in this respect.

I am fully aware that there are only 10 million Belgians – it’s a small country and its problems are by far not as bad as what some other country today face. Yet from the long background analysis that I posted about a year ago, it seems that some of todays problems are the unforeseen unintended consequences of institutional reforms in the last decades – and that may make Belgium into a case study that can also be of interst to other countries, small and large, since we tend often to be too optimistic about the size, impact and relevance of unintended consequences of reforms and policies.

My immediate reaction would have been that, by making the cost of not having a government higher, the financial crisis would be more likely to lead to some kind of resolution, and that the court finding would also increase the demand for a government that could push through legislation if needed. But that’s based on first principles rather than any understanding of the actual situation. So, a couple of questions.

Is there any regional difference in the economic impact of the crisis so far? For example, was Fortis more associated in terms of ownership, management and deposits with one language group?

Also, are the parties split on left-right as well as linguistic grounds? I seem to recall that they are. Perhaps this divide will have renewed salience in the future.

(1) No one expects war or even great inconvenience if Belgium breaks up. Which might be a mistake…

(2) Everyone is sick to death of hearing about it. It’s like waiting for a long-lived, unpleasant relative who everyone has gotten tired of to die.