This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The king of Belgium has accepted the resignation of Charles Michel as prime minister but asked him to stay on at the head of a caretaker government until elections are held in May.

Michel, a Francophone liberal, had led a four-party coalition government that fell earlier this month when the largest party, the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), quit over objections to a UN migration pact.

Subsequent efforts to relaunch as a minority administration failed and Michel submitted his resignation on Tuesday after losing a confidence vote.

The Belgian king, who plays an unusually active role for a constitutional monarch, accepted Michel’s resignation on Friday after meeting leaders from most of Belgium’s political parties at the palace in recent days.

A statement from the palace carried by state broadcaster RTBF said King Philippe had asked Michel to lead a government of “current affairs”, effectively a caretaker administration. The king said that following his meetings he saw “political will to guarantee the good management of the country until the next elections.

He also called on politicians to provide “an appropriate response to the economic, budgetary and international challenges” and meet the population’s expectations on “social and environmental levels”.

The statement appears to end speculation about snap elections in the new year. The “orange-blue” coalition, made up of Flemish Christian Democrats, Flemish liberals and Michel’s French-speaking liberal party, is expected to continue in office.

A caretaker administration is a familiar concept to Belgians. The country went 541 days without a government during a political crisis in 2010 and 2011, setting a record that was only recently surpassed by the Northern Ireland executive. Caretaker governments are not able to make major decisions and budgets are are drawn up on the basis of the previous year’s numbers.

Michel’s government was an experiment for Belgium, which is divided into a richer Flemish-speaking region and a French-speaking part that is struggling to deal with industrial decline. A fragile four-party coalition, it included the N-VA, which officially wants an independent Flanders, but only one Francophone party, Michel’s liberals.

The N-VA announced earlier this month that it was quitting the government because it would not support a UN migration compact. Despite its non-binding nature, Donald Trump’s administrationand several EU member states, including Austria and Hungary, rejected the pact. Belgian political analysts think the N-VA took a tough line because it feared losing votes to the far-right Vlaams Belang in the May elections.

About 5,500 people attended an anti-migration protest organised by Vlaams Belang in Brussels on Sunday, when police used water cannon and teargas to disperse people.

A poll for the newspaper Het Nieuwsblad carried out on the eve of Michel’s decision to resign showed that Vlaams Belang had doubled its share of the vote to 12% compared with previous elections, with the N-VA on 30%.



