Plan overboard!

The euro crisis has prompted national parliaments across the continent to dump their Euro-federalist baggage

It was the political equivalent of Mother Teresa announcing that she had converted to agnosticism. Bart De Wever, the leader of Belgium’s largest political party, was such a Euro-federalist zealot that a year ago he declared he wanted his country to ‘evaporate’ into the beloved EU. But that was so 2010. A few weeks ago he shared a platform with the Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, Europe’s most Eurosceptic head of state, and declared: ‘I am a Eurorealist.’ To walk the walk, De Wever’s party, the N-VA, rejected a Brussels proposal for a new Euro-tax, an act as out of character for Belgian politicians as refusing a Trappist ale. This is a new force in European politics: Belgian Euroscepticism.

There has been much discussion in the British media about how the new intake of Tory MPs, and how Eurosceptic they are.