Re-Bel e-book 21, published in November 2025, 40 pages
By Philippe Van Parijs
Appendix 3 by Kris Deschouwer
Abstract
The electoral system for Brussels’ regional elections uses two separate electoral colleges, one for French speakers and one for Dutch speakers. The most recent electoral results have shown that it no longer fulfils the purpose for which it was created and the subsequent stalemate suggests that it can have detrimental consequences for the functioning of Brussels’ democracy. This dual electoral system has been designed for a Brussels that no longer exists.
However, it does serve a number of legitimate functions. The fulfilment of these functions does not require separate electoral colleges for French speakers and Dutch speakers, but it does require a guaranteed representation of each group in both the Brussels Parliament and the Brussels government. Any acceptable alternative system to the present system therefore needs to include (1) a criterion for the identification of Dutch-speaking versus French-speaking candidates, and (2) a formula for allocating seats to them.
As regards identification, the present conditions — irreversible choice of a language group, endorsement by one outgoing member of the language group or by 500 citizens with the corresponding identity card — can be left unchanged.
As regards seat allocation, three formulas are conceivable in order to achieve fixed quotas between language groups — the same as today (72/17) or any other — with a single electoral college. The “parallel” formula operates with lists that contain two sublists, respectively with French-speaking and Duch-speaking candidates. The seats reserved for each language group are allocated to the corresponding sublists in proportion to the votes cast for the lists of which they are sublists. The “corrective” formula first allocates seats to lists and candidates in the usual way and next corrects the allocation to candidates if it deviates from the language groups’ pre-determined quotas. The “hybrid” formula is the corrective formula with, on each list, two sublists, one for each language group.
Alternatively, one might think of securing a guaranteed representation by imposing a minimum threshold rather than fixed quotas. In this case, not all candidates need to declare themselves French- or Dutch-speaking. Variants of the corrective and of the hybrid formula can be designed accordingly. However, the relative strength of the language groups in the parliament would then be made dependent on the outcome of the elections, and this would endanger the pacification achieved thanks to a fixed representation.
All three formulas with fixed quotas could provide a way of fulfilling all the functions currently served by the dual-college system. They all make bilingual lists possible without preventing monolingual lists. However, the parallel formula threatens the latter’s viability even if the electoral threshold of 5% were to be scrapped. For this reason, the corrective and hybrid formulas can be regarded as more promising. All three formulas are compatible with a direct election of the Brussels members of the Flemish Parliament, as well as with the requirement that the Brussels government should be endorsed by a double majority. This remains a necessity as long as the two components of the regional government form the executives of the Community Commissions. But the adoption of a single-college formula would make it improbable that this requirement will generate the sort of deadlock that followed the June 2024 election.