Belgium forms new government after 16-month deadlock

Nearly 500 days after its federal elections, seven Belgian political parties finally reached an agreement on Wednesday to form a majority coalition government to be headed by Alexander De Croo, the deputy prime minister and minister of finance and development cooperation in the current caretaker government.

De Croo, who will turn 45 on Nov 3, will be the first Flemish federal prime minister since 2011 and is expected to be sworn in on Thursday.

The agreement on Wednesday came after weeks of negotiations to form a majority coalition to replace Prime Minister Sophie Wilmes, who has led a caretaker government since Oct 27 last year after succeeding Charles Michel, who went on to take the job as European Council president.

Wilmes, the first woman to take the job, did not succeed in forming a majority coalition government until the COVID-19 pandemic had hit Belgium in March, when she was nominated on March 16 by the Belgian King to form a permanent minority government.

The new majority coalition government, known as Vivaldi coalition, includes Liberals, Socialists and Greens from the Flemish and French-language regions and the Flemish Christian Democrats.

"That spirit of working together and finding solutions is what I felt in the negotiations," De Croo told a news conference on Wednesday.

"A united, prosperous country where everyone can contribute to finding a better result. In the years to come, we will need everyone to meet the expectations of the population,"

The new prime minister is the son of Herman De Croo, a life-long Belgian politician who held many ministerial positions and was president of the lower house of federal Parliament for eight years.

Before starting his political career began in 2009, De Croo became a project leader of The Boston Consulting Group in 1999. In 2006, he founded the company Darts-ip that specialized in providing services to intellectual property professionals.

The new government is expected to appoint a COVID-19 commissioner to handle the health crisis. Belgium has one of the world's worst COVID-19 fatalities per capita. Its death toll from COVID-19 exceeded 10,000 on Wednesday and total cases numbered more than 115,000 in a country with a population of 11 million.

In her tweets, Wilmes thanked her colleagues in the outgoing government and expressed her best wishes for the upcoming government led by De Croo.

News site Euractiv reported that both the conservative New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) Party, which gained the largest share of the vote in the May 2019 elections with 16 percent, and the right-wing Vlaams Belang party, which acquired 12 percent of the vote in that last poll, will not join the new coalition government.

Euractiv noted that the two Flemish parties have already announced plans "to organize their resistance" to the new government. They have pushed for a confederal Belgium, calling for the country to be split into two separate states capable of making their own political decisions.