The Belgian and European elections are taking place on May 26th, 2019. These elections are to decide which parties will be seated in the Parliaments. I am spending my semester working on a research paper comparing the differences in how elections work in Belgium and the United States.
The community I am learning about are the citizens of Belgium. They have a Parliamentary system where people have a choice of several different parties that are based on their culture and region. Voting is mandatory in Belgium meaning that all Belgians have to make an attempt to vote.
Belgium faces the challenge of having three different cultures that live together in the same country. Even though the country has only twelve million people, there are disagreements between the Flemish, French and German communities making it hard to reach a consensus.
Belgium has created a balance between each group by giving each language community their own parliament and giving a lot of authority to the regional governments. For example, Flanders has combined their cultural and regional parliaments together while the French and German have separate governments.
