The Flemish leader who failed in six months of wrangling to form a Belgian government says he has not given up his ambition of becoming prime minister and insisted his party must be part of any future coalition.
Yves Leterme, Flemish Christian Democrat leader and former premier of Dutch-speaking Flanders, abandoned marathon talks a week ago after he failed to agree with French-speaking parties over the key issue of devolving more powers to the regions.
King Albert has now asked caretaker Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt to seek a swift way out of the crisis, which has led to speculation he might form an emergency government from which Leterme and his party could be excluded.
In newspaper interviews published this weekend, Leterme said he would make every effort to help bring about a government.
But he said: "Let nobody be under any illusion, I will continue to defend our programme as persistently, even if the coalition formation lasts 300 days."
Daily De Standaard quoted Leterme as saying: "I am still a candidate to lead a government ... I still have the ambition to be prime minister," although he added: "But I don't now rule out that it could be somebody else."
Leterme said it was time to seek as broad a coalition as possible and stressed there could not be a government without his Christian Democrats, widely recognised as the winner of June's election, and their separatist partners N-VA. Leterme's group is the largest in parliament, with 30 of the 150 seats.
Leterme's plan was to form a government with the francophone equivalents of the Christian Democrats and the Dutch- and French-speaking Liberals, but he now believes the Socialists or Greens must be brought on board.
The state reform the Flemish demand, and French-speakers resist, requires two-thirds majority backing in parliament. Despite talk of a broader coalition, Leterme has done little to win over francophones.
He got more rebukes at the weekend by saying there were some who equated francophone state broadcaster RTBF's political reporting with Radio Mille Collines, which called on Hutus to massacre Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.
Spokesman Paul Poulussen said Leterme had not likened the two. "He just pointed out that some in Brussels are making the comparison. When a man quotes someone else, is he responsible for what the person he quotes is saying?"
The delay in forming a government is a record even by the tortuous standards of Belgium, home to the European Union and Nato. The deadlock has sparked talk of the 177-year-old state splitting into Dutch- and French-speaking parts.