[lg policy] British prime minister ruffled a few francophone Belgian feathers last week

[Harold Schiffman]

When Dave met Bart

24.03.2011 / 04:08 CET

Flemish nationalist heads to London.

David Cameron, the British prime minister, ruffled a few francophone
Belgian feathers last week by playing host in London to Bart De Wever,
leader of the nationalist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA). De Wever had a
half-hour meeting at 10 Downing Street last Thursday and an N-VA
delegation including Jan Jambon – who is something of a hate-figure to
the Walloons – was then entertained at the national parliament in
Westminster.

“De Wever is a significant player in Belgian politics. We don't regard
the N-VA as extremist. They are a centre-right party,” said David
Lidington, the UK's Europe minister. But putting the Walloons' noses
out of joint might not have been Cameron's main preoccupation. It
seems that the meeting may have had more to do with the British
Conservatives' desire to strengthen their group in the European
Parliament, the European Conservatives and Reformists.

Questions have resurfaced over the ECR's stability after Michał
Kaminski, a Polish MEP, quit as group leader in February. Kaminski and
two other Polish members split from Poland's Law and Justice party
(PiS) to set up their own rival party within the ECR group. Derk-Jan
Eppink, a Belgian MEP who is already in the ECR, said that he helped
broker Thursday's meeting after Cameron and his staff expressed
interest in meeting De Wever.

Eppink said that a “serious offer” was put in front of De Wever for
his party to join up with the ECR group ahead of the next European
elections. Although De Wever's N-VA party has only one MEP at present,
Frieda Brepoels, it now ranks as the most popular political party in
Dutch-speaking Flanders, with opinion polls putting its support at
about 30%. Brepoels sits in the Greens/European Free Alliance group,
which gives rise to another question about the Cameron-De Wever
love-in: is the N-VA sufficiently anti-federalist for the ECR? It took
a very pro-EU stance during last year's Belgian elections.



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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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