A couple of weeks ago the European Court of Justice did the expected and found Belgium to be in breach of EU law by failing to provide voting rights in municipal elections to EU citizens. Despite being the "capital" of the EU it is the only country in the Union to fail to do so. Unless the Belgian authorities put this right soon the court can fine the government as much as £120,000 a day.
Some 135,000 Eurocrats and their camp followers, parliamentary assistants, journalists, and lobbyists are believed to contribute up to 10 per cent of the Brussels region's economy but have no say in how the city is governed. In Belgium there are some 560,000 non-Belgian EU citizens and a further 350,000 non-EU residents.
To change the law, however, means amending the constitution, and that requires a two-thirds majority in the parliament. The Belgian government is willing to do so but argues that any extension of votes to EU citizens should also apply to non-EU residents, a prospect that has only contributed to intensifying fears among the city's minority Flemish community that they will be completely frozen out.
Eighty-five per cent of the population of the city is Francophone. The Flemish community fears that the new voters are likely to vote overwhelmingly for Francophone parties. The possibility has emerged that some Brussels communes would be completely devoid of Flemish representation.
Enter Brigitte Grouwels, Minister for Brussels in the Flemish regional parliament, and a political colleague of the Prime Minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene.
She will not back any change, she says, unless the government also makes provision for minimum automatic representation for the Flemish community in Brussels institutions. Deadlock.
The government has now put off a vote until the autumn when most believe a compromise will be agreed. Meanwhile, another running dispute with potentially even more dangerous consequences for Belgium's precarious federal system has blown up.
Lodewijck de Witte, the governor of the Flemish region of Brabant, covering Brussels suburbs, has struck out a new environmental charge imposed by one of the local communes because the town hall sent details of the charge to local Francophone residents in French. Not surprisingly the mayor of the commune of Wexembek-Oppen is furious. He and the mayors of five other communes have demanded federal government intervention.
The six communes are known as "a facilite" - although technically part of Flanders, outside the bilingual Brussels region, residents of the communes have been allowed under a 1962 law to deal with communal authorities in French.
In March, however, the Minister of the Interior of the Flanders region, Leo Peeters, decided to issue an edict insisting that none of the communes should provide a resident with any documentation in French unless that resident specifically asked for it in each case. What is more, no document would be legally valid, he insisted, unless it had first been issued in Flemish.
The circular is being contested in the courts and ignored by the "facility" communes which all have substantial Francophone populations (some have Francophone majorities). Mr Peeters insists that "facilities" were intended as temporary rights while local people taught themselves Flemish. They had clearly violated the spirit of the deal by not doing so, he argues. The mayors insist that Mr de Witte is acting ultra vires and have called on the federal government to intervene. But to do so the government must take on regional officials of the Flemish Socialist Party, one of its coalition partners.
The dispute bodes ill for the review next year of the constitutional arrangements agreed in 1994 that gave Belgium the most developed federal structure in Europe. Once again the problem centres on the rights of linguistic minorities within the devolved regional system, often in communes which fate has placed on the wrong side of the boundaries between the linguistic regions. In the past, disputes in the small town of Fourons have brought down governments.
In Laatste Nieuws Luc van der Keelen editorialised, noting that communal tensions had not been as bad for three years: "Hence the perpetual questions - what does Belgium mean to us? What are we doing together? What should we ask the federal government to do? Such questions on the ultimate meaning of Belgium have to be answered in the end. If we avoid them the volcano will explode."
