All About Yves

After two short-lived unhappy stints as Prime Minister, Yves Leterme has enjoyed a relatively successful 17-month term as caretaker Prime Minister. But now he’s off to Paris to join the OECD. We met him before he left

Yves Leterme is beaming as he welcomes me into his office, a relatively restrained corner room in the sprawling, neoclassical government complex overlooking Brussels Park. He’s bouncing with energy, and his warm voice and cheerful mood seems almost out of place.

Wasn’t Leterme supposed to be the awkward politician, never comfortable with the personal demands of his job? Hasn’t he been in the absurd situation of operating as Belgium’s caretaker Prime Minister for the past year and a half?

Yet Leterme seems ‘demob happy’. He can see the light at the end of the tunnel. His phantom premiership began on June 13, 2010, as the polls closed after the Belgian elections, when he should have been preparing to hand over the reins of power to another administration. Seventeen months on, he is still waiting. Now, having smashed all records for political limbo in modern democratic politics, Belgium looks set to form a government. And some day before the end of this year, he will finally leave the Prime Minister’s job he’s been trying to quit for the past 18 months to take up a post with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. However, when exactly is unclear, and it has been a fool’s game predicting a date for the changing of the guard.

So how does Leterme explain his bizarre predicament? “It’s Magritte, it’s so surrealistic!” he says. Not least the fact that his time as caretaker has far outstripped his two supposedly fully-empowered stints as Prime Minister. And despite the constitutional and political constraints, Leterme has been remarkably effective during this period, able to govern quietly while the media has focused its attention on the epic political squabbles over future coalitions. Among the issues he has managed are: the Belgian presidency of the European Union last year; the inter-professional agreement on wages between unions and employers; the downgrading of Belgium’s credit rating and the subsequent budget revision; the conflict in Libya; and the ongoing Eurozone crisis. The outgoing administration has ticked over so smoothly that some have suggested – only half-jokingly – that Belgium works better without a formal government.

Leterme’s dutiful steering of the ship has helped rehabilitate his reputation across the country: French-speakers, for whom he was once a bête noire, a clumsy Flemish bully, now hail his leadership qualities. Leterme accepts that he was a polarising figure. “Before the June 2010 elections, I was seen as one of the people who created antagonisms,” he says. But he’s not involved in the institutional negotiations, currently being led by Elio Di Rupo, the leader of the francophone Socialists and the presumptive Prime Minister. “I can focus on the socio-economic and financial issues. And these are the issues I feel best at,” Leterme says.

His own party, the conservative Christian Democrat CD&V, has now forgiven him for the pitiful score in the 2010 elections. Wouter Beke has replaced him as party leader, but Leterme – seen as a liability after the elections – is now viewed as a stabilising influence. “There was a shift. Instead of being part of the problem, I became part of the solution,” he says.

Yet history may still blame Leterme for fermenting the Belgian crisis. It was under his watch that the CD&V formed its so-called electoral cartel with the Flemish nationalist N-VA. Once a marginal party, the N-VA, led by Bart De Wever, used the alliance to gain visibility: it is now the biggest political force in the country, and its influence at times seems to paralyze Belgium’s political system. But Leterme denies the cartel was simply an electoral ploy. “The feeling of frustration towards the way the Belgian system functioned was there in the public opinion,” he says. “What I did was to take into account this strong feeling in the electorate, and try to transform it into a positive power.”

The N-VA has now been jettisoned from the institutional reform and coalition building negotiations, but given their electoral strength, which has surged with the crisis, this could work to their advantage, Leterme warns. “It’s risky to leave these people outside the game,” he says. “N-VA has managed to get itself into a position, where it does not have to take responsibility for what is done. They like that. But for democracy, for the normal multiparty process, this is a strange situation.”

Read full article in The Bulletin, November 4