A group of French-speaking fans were looking for a cab to go to Belgium’s World Cup game. Coming from the other direction on the famed Avenida Paulista, Flemish-speaking fans were loudly looking for lunch. They crossed each other, listened, looked at one another’s Belgian red shirts, and suddenly it was high fives and thumbs up. It was the sporting spirit of São Paulo, which is all too rarely the political spirit of the Belgian capital Brussels.
For a country in the throes of separatism, the World Cup is providing almost a surreal glue of unity. When Belgium’s motto L’Union fait la force – unity makes strength – is increasingly turned into L’Union fait la farce – unity is the joke – the performance of the national team is lost on no one, either in Brazil or at home. It should not be lost on the United States, too, their next opponents in an increasingly successful World Cup campaign.
“My players will give everything for Belgium,” said the coach Marc Wilmots, a former senator who has defended the concept of a united nation. The prime minister, Elio Di Rupo, a staunch Francophone defender of Belgium in the face of the rising Flemish nationalist N-VA party, is loving every minute of the rise of the Red Devils, especially Tuesday’s match against the USA. “Hey @BarackObama, I am betting some great Belgian beers that our @BelRedDevils will make it to the quarter final! :-),” he tweeted after Thursday’s 1-0 victory over South Korea.
The political divisions back home make the USA’s motto at the tournament “One Nation One Team” almost a taunt to Belgians. While the Belgian political arena is carefully divided down to the last parliamentary seat among the 6.5 million Dutch-speakers from northern Flanders and 4.5 million Francophones from the south, the national team are a mix of languages where keeping tally of the numbers of Flemings and Francophones has become a thing of the past. Even Wilmots represents that unity because he is a Francophone married to a Fleming.
The division between sports and politics could not be starker these days. While the national team keep winning and the black, yellow and red flags are waved in unison, Belgian politics has again stumbled into crisis. Elections last month made the regionalist N-VA party even bigger in Flanders and, predictably, government negotiations are bogged down in fundamental contradictions between north and south. Four years ago, elections spawned a record 541 days of negotiations before Di Rupo became premier. Di Rupo is from poorer Wallonia, which traditionally leans in favour of national unity because the region would likely find it difficult to survive on its own economically. The N-VA has traditionally campaigned on a platform that Wallonia is a burden to Flanders, preventing it realising its economic potential. At the World Cup, such ideas are scoffed at.
“We still don’t have a government yet. We don’t care. We will keep the country united,” said the central defender Nicolas Lombaerts. Belgium’s fans think so too. “There is only one Belgium, with Flemings and Francophones united,” said Yves Hauglustaine, a Francophone entering retirement after a life of work for the national railway company that shuttles masses across the linguistic border on a daily basis. This is the contradiction between the way people vote and the way they feel in a country that cherishes surrealism as a national treasure.
“People vote totally different than the way they feel about football,” said Kris Beyen of Flemish Leuven, all dressed up in red and ready to join the thousands of Belgians at the Arena Corinthians, and also unable to explain the yawning discrepancy. The political expert Dave Sinardet said it could be explained because politics has been hermetically sealed in linguistic camps, with a Flemish electorate almost never able to vote for Francophones, and vice versa.
At the same time, football can only be successful when that divide is successfully bridged. “To win a World Cup, there are strong incentives to work together,” said Sinardet, a professor at Brussels University.
It is rare when there is a common cause to cheer. Besides football, royalty is another one, but Queen Mathilde did not help her cause when she mixed up the hero of the victory over Russia, Divock Origi, with Romelu Lukaku during official presentations. “Belgians certainly are not the biggest patriots but the success of the Red Devils has brought those latent feeling to the surface,” Sinardet said.
It is this that makes Wilmots so proud as a coach. He especially loves that the victories are cheered with equal passion across the nation. Now stadiums in Belgium are filled with wildly cheering fans watching the games on a big screen, while the action is half a world away. No so long ago, the Belgian federation could not fill a stadium for a live game, even giving away tickets. “They used to give away jerseys and they gave them back. Now, they fight for them,” Wilmots said.
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