Home / Vol.11, n°3 / Les rapports entre droit et politique dans un contexte d'instabilité institutionnelle: Effet de contagion ? Le cas de la Belgique fédérale

The purpose of the article is to analyse the complex relationships between politics and law in a context of institutional instability. It takes Belgium as a case study. The goal is to demonstrate that, if the political sphere is under the influence of law, the relationship between the two spheres can not be considered as linear.

Since several decades, Belgium is under a process of major institutional reforms. But reforms go beyond the constitutional sphere and affect several fields. The variations of the electoral law illustrate this phenomenon. The Belgian context is one of growing reformism. However, the emphasis will be put on the impact of this reformism on the relationships between law and politics. At first sight, one could conclude that this context favours the extension of the law sphere to the detriment of the political sphere. Nevertheless, two elements could qualify this idea.

One the one hand, reformism follows from the polarization on the linguistic cleavage. The institutional developments are initiated by the political sphere in order to adapt the State structure to a new political reality. On the other hand, consociational federalism generates several management difficulties. In order to be able to propose a solution that would be approvable by both linguistic segments, the political sphere is more and more encouraged to bypass legal railings. This seizure of the political sphere on the law sphere sometimes seems contagious. It spreads to other fields than the institutional field and generates experimentation and legal uncertainty.

These arguments lead us to propose a more nuanced vision of the relationship between law and politics in the federal Belgium.

[*] Doctorante, Centre d’étude de la vie politique, Université libre de Bruxelles (Cevipol, ULB)