Bart de Wever given two more weeks to form federal government

N-VA party leader Bart De Wever will continue his work as formateur in leading negotiations for forming a new Belgian federal government for at least another two weeks, the royal palace has announced.

“The King has noted that there has not yet been a decisive breakthrough in forming a new government, but that talks are still under way,” the palace said.

De Wever will next report to the King on 25 November. In the meantime, he is continuing to handle negotiations between the N-VA, MR, Les Engagés and CD&V parties in the hope that another party will eventually join them.

The first option, dubbed the "Arizona" coalition, would involve the Vooruit party returning to the table to move forward in the negotiations.

This option is currently blocked because Vooruit said the basic texts of the negotiations should be more balanced and De Wever so far has no intentions of rewriting them yet again, so as not to risk losing his other partners.

The second option being considered in parallel involves replacing Vooruit with Open VLD. Obstacles to that include a short majority in the house and no majority in the Flemish-language group – something for which De Wever has condemned previous federal governments. The CD&V party is also staunchly opposed to this option, party chairman Sammy Mahdi has said repeatedly.

This means that forming the next government will require Vooruit’s return to the table or Mahdi changing his mind about Open VLD joining – something he insisted he would not do as recently as Tuesday morning, when he declared that even if time is running out to form the government, “we will not support such a coalition of chaos”.

Those close to the negotiations say the first option remains the most likely given resistance to Open VLD’s participation.

“It’s a real deadlock because for several weeks now we've been seeing that this Arizona coalition, which still seems to be the only really politically feasible coalition, is fundamentally blocked and it's not at all certain that in the next two weeks Vooruit will be able to get back to the table,” said Dave Sinardet, a political scientist at the UC Louvain and VUB.