BELGIUM New Cabinet
In the grey winter dawn, women & children picked hungrily through Brussels garbage bins. Au Bon Marché, the city’s biggest department store, put on a bitter window display: at a table sat a cadaverous old man, muffled against the winter and staring dully at his rations. Signs announced that he was getting 1,000 calories a day, less than the minimum necessary for healthy life.
That was Belgium’s mood as Hubert Pierlot, Premier through five years of peace & war, plodded to the rostrum of Parliament. He knew, and the 180 Deputies knew, that this would be his farewell address. The left (Communists and Socialists) was determined to oust him. The center (Liberals) was hostile. The right (his own Catholic Conservatives) was no longer solidly behind him. The whole Chamber had applauded a Socialist taunt: “The country needs a good sea pilot, and we have only a river pilot.”
Wearily, Hubert Pierlot defended his record. Wearily he traced his country’s ills, its hunger, unrest and ravenous Allied military demands. (Each month Belgium was supplying $30,000,000 worth of goods and services to the Anglo-American armies.) Wearily he said: “It will be the same for the government of tomorrow.”
When Hubert Pierlot finished, two and a half hours later, the Chamber was half empty, the silence was implacably hostile.
Next day, before a vote could be taken, Hubert Pierlot resigned.
Promptly Regent Prince Charles summoned the Socialist leader Achille van Acker, a basketmaker’s son who had played a prominent resistance role, to form a new government. The Socialists found that it is harder to make a government than to unmake one. Achille van Acker sought a coalition of the four major parties. But Catholic Conservatives were reluctant to sit in a Cabinet with Communists. And the Communists, if they were brushed off, might retaliate disastrously. Their new union, the Comité de Lutte Syndicale, had organized a six-weeks-old strike in the coal fields. It had halved the peacetime output of the country’s most vital industry, brought the whole economy to semiparalysis, threatened to hamstring the Allied offensive. The Communist price for industrial peace was a share in the government.
At week’s end the other parties decided to pay the price. Achille van Acker succeeded in making political ends meet in a four-party Cabinet.
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