Belgian voters to punish leaders crisis

EUROPE'S longest-serving Prime Minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, was bracing himself for an electoral battering in Belgium yesterday as voters threatened to punish the government for the country's worst food safety scare.

"I would understand the reaction perfectly, and draw my conclusions," Mr Dehaene said, when asked about poll predictions that his Christian Democrat party and its coalition allies would pay a high price for an economic and social catastrophe nicknamed Chickengate.

The government faces the electors 16 days after the news that it had kept quiet for weeks about a scandal in which cancer-causing dioxin entered the food chain.

Already the crisis has cost the jobs of two government ministers, one from Mr Dehaene's party and one from the Socialists, the main coalition partners.

A week ago the Prime Minister announced the suspension of all election campaigning as supermarket shelves were emptied of poultry, eggs, beef and pork, the list of suspect produce grew by the day, and the Belgian government was castigated by other European capitals.

As polling day loomed the tactics became more desperate. Last week the two political casualties - the Health Minister, Marcel Colla, and the Farm Minister, Karel Pinxten, who resigned on 1 June - were disowned with promises that neither would feature in the new government.

And Celia Dehaene, the Prime Minister's wife, appeared on the front page of the tabloid La Derniere Heure seasoning a raw chicken on a grill, and arguing that the dioxin scare was a political frame-up.

For seven years Mr Dehaene has been the political glue behind a byzantine system governing a country deeply divided between its French and Dutch- speaking populations. Not for nothing is the portly Mr Dehaene known as the "plumber" after his ability to fix tangled situations. In 1994 his political skills nearly brought him the job of European Commission president until John Major vetoed the appointment.

But the defects of the deal-making coalition politics that keep the Belgian state in existence have become increasingly clear to the population. Last year two of Mr Dehaene's ministers were forced to quit when Marc Dutroux, accused of at least four child murders, briefly escaped from prison.

And a corruption trial last year, seen by many as an indictment of the country's political establishment, ended in a three-year suspended jail sentence for Willy Claes, former Nato secretary-general.

But while these crises shook confidence in public life, some of the population shrugged its shoulders and got on with life. Chickengate, however, is different because it has thrown every Belgian family into turmoil, and wreaked economic destruction on farming, food processing and retailing.

Little wonder, then that polls show one-third of the population was thinking of changing its vote because of the crisis, and more than 60 per cent were worried for their health. A big electoral rebuff would spell the end of Mr Dehaene's reign, but predictions are difficult to make in the complex multi-party system.