Belgium went to war in Libya without having a government

Four Belgian F-16s took off from the Greek air base of Araxos at 14.54 on 21 March 2011, on day 281 without a government. They were going to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya as part of Odyssey Dawn, the operation then under American command; NATO did not take sole command until 31 March. That first sortie was a patrol over the Mediterranean, west of Crete, guided by an AWACS radar aircraft: they were cleared to intervene and did not. On 28 March, Belgian F-16s struck a ground target for the first time.

The government that authorised the mission, at two o'clock that afternoon, had spent almost eleven months not quite existing.

The king had accepted Yves Leterme's resignation on 26 April 2010. From that day his cabinet was a caretaker government: a team that stays in post to handle routine business — paying wages and keeping the schools open — while the parties negotiate a new one. The election was held on 13 June 2010 and the new government took office on 6 December 2011. Between those two dates there are 541 days, and Guinness certified that figure, counted from election to swearing-in, as the world record for the longest time without a government in a country at peace.

In that time Belgium paid pensions and held the presidency of the Council of the European Union for six months, from July to December 2010, because that presidency rotates by turns and that turn was its own. And it went to war. The full Chamber voted the resolution backing the intervention that same afternoon, unanimously but for one abstention, with the four aircraft already airborne. A cabinet that could not push through a pension reform could send fighter jets to the Mediterranean.

What broke the deadlock was the price of money. In late November 2011, with Belgian debt punished in the markets and a downgrade freshly on the table — Standard & Poor's, one of the three big agencies that score countries, took a notch off it on 25 November — the six parties settled in under a week the deal they had spent a year and a half failing to settle. Eighteen months of meetings had not been enough; one week of nervous markets was.

And it happened again. Between Charles Michel's resignation, in December 2018, and Alexander De Croo's swearing-in on 1 October 2020, Belgium spent 652 days between the fall of one government and the swearing-in of the next — 494 of them counted from the election of 26 May 2019, so the 2010 record holds — and the first wave of the pandemic fell inside those 652 days.

The cabinet that shut the country down in March 2020, imposed the lockdowns and bought medical supplies was a caretaker minority government led by Sophie Wilmès, which parliament had to give a vote of confidence and then special powers so that it could legislate by decree. The most intrusive decisions in the country's recent history were taken at full speed by a team that was there on loan.

The administration did not stop in either stretch: the civil servant who pays the pension, the inspector who signs the report, the doctor on call. What stood still was whatever decides the next ten years — a tax reform, a pension plan, a housing act — because nobody signs that without a majority behind them.

Adding up the two stretches the way Guinness counts them, 541 plus 494, Belgium has spent 1,035 days waiting for a government after voting. Two years and 305 days. In that time it presided over the European Union, bombed Libya and confined eleven million people to their homes.