BRUSSELS BRIEFING April 2005

News this month

Trouble at the top

José Manuel Durão Barroso, the president of the European Commission, is not settling into Brussels well. He got off on the wrong foot with the European Parliament last year, when he tried to force through the nomination of a controversial Italian commissioner. Ever since, the parliament has enjoyed snapping at his heels. Mr Barroso has failed to make a good impression on some key European leaders: Jacques Chirac, France's president, and Gerhard Schröder, Germany's chancellor, opposed his nomination, and still regard him as too economically liberal and Atlanticist.

Mr Barroso's weak hold on the Commission was clear at an EU summit in late March, one of the shortest on record. The heads of state agreed to re-examine a flagship piece of legislation of the Barroso commission: a proposed directive to liberalise the EU’s internal trade in services. They plan to amend it to take into account French and German concerns about “social dumping”—the threat that wages and work-place protection will be under-cut by new competition from central Europe. Also the stability and growth pact, designed to force governments to exercise fiscal control, has been rendered more or less toothless, after Europe’s finance ministers agreed on revisions. This is thanks to heavy lobbying by France and Germany, which had repeatedly flouted the previous rules. The French government has also blamed Mr Barroso for hurting the prospect of a yes vote in a coming referendum on the EU constitution. Brussels analysts now say that if Mr Barroso does not recover his authority in the months before the summer break, he will be a lame duck for the rest of his five-year term.

In remembrance

News that Liverpool and Juventus football clubs will play each other in the next round of the European Champions’ League has brought back haunting memories in Brussels. The last time the two sides met in the final of the same competition, in 1985 in Brussels’s Heysel stadium, fighting broke out between English and Italian fans and a wall collapsed; 39 people, mainly Italian fans, were crushed to death. English clubs were subsequently barred from competing in Europe for five years, and the stadium was rebuilt and renamed. The Brussels region has announced that it will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the accident this year, It has commissioned artwork by Patrick Rimoux, a French artist, to be placed in the new stadium next to Block Z, where the tragedy took place. The work will include a stainless steel “sundial” column with 39 illuminated prisms, representing each of the victims, and a poem by W.H. Auden.

Remorseful

While in Israel in mid-March, Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian prime minister, promised that January 27th—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz—will be an official annual day of Holocaust remembrance in Belgium. Mr Verhofstadt was speaking at the recent reopening of the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem, as one of more than 40 world leaders in attendance. More than 25,000 Jews were deported from Belgium during the second world war; less than 2,000 returned.

Bye-bye Belgium?

Elio Di Rupo, leader of the French-speaking Socialist party and a leading candidate to succeed Guy Verhofstadt as prime minister, has raised the hitherto taboo subject of the possible break-up of Belgium. After particularly bitter communal disputes over the demarcation of parliamentary constituencies around Brussels—and a separate debate over whether Belgium should have a referendum on the EU constitution—Mr Di Rupo linked the two ideas by suggesting that Belgians should vote on whether they wish to remain a single, unified country, or whether they want to split along linguistic lines into Francophone Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders.

In fact, there is little chance of such a vote ever taking place. But the suggestion helped raise Mr Di Rupo's profile at a time when Mr Verhofstadt's appeal continues to wane. Still, the challenger faces serious obstacles in his rise to the top. Not only is he openly gay, but more importantly he comes from the French-speaking part of the country (though originally of Italian origin). No Francophone has become prime minister of Belgium since the 1970s.

Return to sender

A Belgian court has approved the extradition of a suspected Islamic militant to Spain, where he is wanted in connection with the Madrid train bombings of March 11th 2004. Youssef Belhadj is suspected of being “Abu Dujan”, the Al-Qaeda spokesman who claimed responsibility for the bombings, which killed 191 people. Originally from Morocco, Mr Belhadj was first arrested last year, suspected of belonging to the radical Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. He was arrested again in February 2005, following a European warrant. Belgium's Supreme Court of Appeals rejected his final appeal against extradition on March 23rd; federal prosecutors say he will be sent to Spain within ten days. Mr Belhadj maintains his innocence.

Brussels brains

The future of European higher education was also a talking point at the EU summit, but on that score Belgium seems to have little to worry about. The country's universities have done well in an international ranking published by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES). The ranking of 200 universities around the world, published in November 2004 (but splashed across Brussels papers in time for the summit) was compiled by surveying 1,300 academics in 88 countries.

The Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve finished 53rd and the Free University of Brussels placed 54th, which puts them fourth and fifth among Francophone universities (behind École Polytechnique and École Normale Supérieure, both French, and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, which is Swiss). Their achievements are particularly noteworthy as they are legally obliged to accept all Belgian applicants with a school-leaving certificate. They charge only €750 ($982) per year—compared with about €20,000 to attend a top American university.

Catch if you can

April 2005

Two Cultures in One: Jews of Morocco

Until May 15th 2005

The new Jewish Museum of Belgium showcases a selection of artefacts from the Dahan-Hirsch collection, the world's largest private collection of Moroccan Jewish art. Though it has grown difficult to imagine a time when Jews were harmoniously embedded in an Arabic culture, for millennia Morocco played host to a Jewish community, the largest in the Arab world. History has pushed a number of these Jews towards Israel, but significant numbers have settled in the Francophone world, including France and Belgium. Objects on display include jewellery, tapestries, paintings, clothing and religious artefacts.

The Jewish Museum of Belgium, 21 rue des Minimes, Brussels 1000. Tel: +32 (0)2 512-1963. Open: Sun-Fri, 10am-5pm. Entry: €5. For more information, visit the museum's website.

More from the Brussels cultural calendar