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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   615 thread views

Transnational Thursday for December 4, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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The Guardian: Brussels goes record-breaking 542 days without a government

The Brussels Capital Region, which governs the Belgian capital of 1.25 million people [roughly comparable to Philadelphia in both population and area], has not had a government since elections in June 2024.

The city has now surpassed the record of the country as a whole, which made headlines around the world in 2010-11 when it took 541 days to form a government, the longest period to form an administration in peacetime.

it is unlikely Brussels will have a government anytime soon. Rancorous divisions, sometimes descending into personal insults, continue among the 14 parties that won places in the 89-seat parliament.

This means deadlock in the self-styled capital of Europe, which hosts the EU institutions and Nato, amid a growing budget crisis, rising levels of drug-related violence, and homelessness as city authorities struggle to manage irregular migrants seeking a place to stay.

An open letter signed by nearly 200 business, academic and cultural figures published on Monday lamented “541 days of seeing Brussels slide into an unprecedented institutional void and funding crisis”. The letter, published in Belgium’s major newspapers, Le Soir and De Standaard, says “political inaction is now affecting our daily lives” and that the “immense challenges that Brussels needs to tackle – economic, social, climatic and institutional – can no longer wait”.

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