Some thoughts after 540 days without government and 2 weeks with a government

  • Isn't it pure democracy when a (resigning) government is only supposed to execute measures & take care things get done but not make any decisions themselves but leave that up to the parliament? Isn't that in fact the ideal situation rather than a problem?
  • If a country has 7 governments/councils each with their own authorisations & power due to the federalised structure of the nation...the country doesn't fall apart right away if one government is missing.
  • Maybe that's the only advantage of having different election dates / periods for the different levels of government: some are still up and running when others fail.  Yet they do fail because so many governements with different election dates also provide constant election stress & profiling
  • It is amasing how (seemingly) effective a government in the background can run when they do not need to be in the spotlight anymore (and cannot make a lot of new decisions).....it's amasing how the public opinion can switch from "they can't do it" to "thank god they are keeping this country running after all". 
  • We must have excellent civil servants & ministries that kept the country's federal departments running through an economic crisis without a panic.
  • Is there a strategy behind negotiating all night until the morning....then going to catch a nap in order to pick up the discussions again in the evening?  I assume fatigue makes you easier to give in....and there's less stress for statements in the next news edition or the effect of a potential leak going viral through twitter is smaller.
  • It takes experience to negotiate effectively....the fact that so many "new" negotiators were around the table has not done us good.  The fact that apparently the negotiators already knew they'd not become an exectutive in the new governemnt and therefor wanted to pinpoint every single detail on paper yet either  (but it should increase the speed of execution now).
  • It's amasing how much we've all complained about not having a government.....then how much we complain that the new government wants to take action too quickly or rushed.
  • ...either that or the unions simply have been impatiently waiting for some government to action against, since within 2 weeks of the new government, we had a national strike against a needed pension reform.
  • The first struggle in the government negotiations were North-Flemish-Dutchspeaking against South-Wallonian-Frenchspeaking.  The budget negotations struggled over left socialist over right liberal contrasts.  The current strike discussions seem to polarise over different generations.  We seem a quite polarised society.
  • Some processes apparently can't be shortcut without problems...eg social negotiations with the unions. 

Comments

Brian Miller said…
i imagine this will be an intersting process after so long without...


i hope you have a marvelous holiday with your family!
Virtualsprite said…
I wish I had some insight, but we're going through much of the same things here, even though we had a government all the way through. Every time someone new is in power, things change and the people in my state (each state has their own government, which works with the federal government) are really having a hissy right now.

My thoughts are with you!

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