Belgium: The New Combo

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After a month of fruitless search for the right combination of parties for a government for Belgium, King Baudouin last week found a formula that might work. He asked the moderate Christian Socialists and the conservative Liberal Party to try their hands at forming a new coalition government. Out of power and into opposition for the first time in five years went the Socialists of Paul-Henri Spaak.

For his new Premier, the King picked Christian Socialist Leader Paul Vanden Boeynants, 46, known to his political associates as V.D.B. (pronounced Vay-daybay). But the key instrument of the new combo was the Liberal Party, whose antitax, anti-spending policies appeal both to big business and to former Socialist proletarians who have graduated into the bourgeoisie. It also advocates moderation, preaching bilingualism against the hotheaded Walloon and Flemish separatists.

Premier Boeynants seems well-suited for center-right coalition work. The son of a pork butcher and once a sausage salesman himself, he has filled his study with leather-bound volumes of Albert Camus, Will Durant and Louis Aragon, and there is a framed copy in French of

Kipling's If. Jesuit-educated and briefly a German prisoner of war, V.D.B. "did a bit in the Resistance" before following his father into the butcher's trade. Later he entered politics, which led him in 1958 to the post of Minister of the Middle Classes and work on the Brussels World's Fair. A bug on physical fitness, he works out each day at a local gym, eats sparingly, often lunching at the office on an apple and a piece of cheese. He likes to strike a Kennedyesque pose, is on the phone constantly, devoured The Making of the President 1960 before his successful 1961 legislative campaign.

Stepped-Up Austerity. V.D.B. and the Liberals promise a stepped-up austerity program to reduce last year's $440 million deficit, and to actually balance this year's $3.2 billion budget. To that end, the new coalition is already talking of closing down the six state-run "free medicine" clinics (source of last year's 18-day-long doctors' strike), freezing school construction until September 1968, and retiring 1,000 railroad workers a year to flatten featherbeds. Defense spending is also under scrutiny for possible cuts.

Prospects of success, however, are dim. Even as V.D.B. was lining up his new Cabinet last week, Brussels' 3,000 cops went out on a 24-hour strike, demanding higher wages and better protection (two policemen were killed in the past four months). Meanwhile, 10,000 Flemish students and agitators marched through the streets of Louvain, continuing their demand that French-speaking students leave (TIME, March 4). Belgium's problems still look bigger than Belgium's government-a point the Socialists hope to take advantage of in their new role of opposition.