The economically depressed Belgian region of Wallonia finds new cohesion and purpose as its people unite against a looming deal they fear will make them even poorer. Charleroi, Belgium (dpa) - Belgium's southern region of Wallonia and its 3.6 million French-speaking inhabitants have pitched themselves against the EU-Canada free trade agreement, which many fear could finish off the struggling local economy.
The Walloons can still block the enactment of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which in eliminating 98 percent of tariffs between Canada and the European Union could see local producers get knocked out by the cheaper prices of North American competitors.
But many people are rooting for the underdogs to beat the big boys with some pluck and fancy footwork. The bastion of the opposition is the region's largest city of Charleroi, the home of Wallonia's socialist leader Paul Magnette, who is also its mayor. "It's the first time I agree with Magnette," says one woman in a café in the city centre, repeating again and again that "CETA is bad for Belgium." Her daughter, who is studying medicine in Brussels, also thinks so, says the 48-year-old lab technician who grew up on a farm in Wallonia.
Local producers fear the trade deal will allow Canadian farmers to undercut them and run Belgium's agriculture into the ground, she says, adding, "I want to eat local things." Many others agree in this city of 200,000 people located 50 kilometres south of Brussels, and this has created a new sense of solidarity. The regional capital could do with a boost to its self-esteem.
In Charleroi they say the Dutch make jokes about Flemish Belgians, the Flemish make jokes about the Walloons, and the rest of Wallonia makes fun of Charleroi. Readers of the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant even voted it "the ugliest city in the world," its neglect symbolized not only by the closed factories but also the subway line that was never put into operation and just gathers dust. Almost every fourth person in this suffering industrial city is unemployed and the situation will get worse before it gets better.
Another plant run by an American construction machine manufacturer is soon expected to close, which adds more grist to the mayor's mill. "Paul Magnette is not a hero. He does this [agitate] so that people elect him," says 28-year-old Michael Goffaux, who has participated in the CETA opposition campaign for three years. He works as a fund raiser for the environmental protection group Greenpeace, but in CETA matters he speaks only for himself, he emphasizes.
A sticker on the back of his mobile phone also calls for an end to the planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) Europe-US trade pact, which Goffaux believes will ride into the EU after the "Trojan horse" of the Canadian deal, as he describes it. Both agreements are anti-democratic, threaten jobs and undermine European standards, he says. But are the Walloons likely to see their fight through to the end? After all, they are more readily characterized as convivial than gladiatorial. "Walloons are easy, always fun. We are guided by the French way of life," one of their most famous sons, ex-football star and former Belgian national team manager Marc Wilmots, told the German soccer magazine 11 Freunde (11 Friends).
The regional tourist association takes a similar line. Local artist and tour guide Nicolas Buissart says attitudes rather got tougher as fears grow that globalization will only make people here poorer. "We've lost too much," says the 36-year-old, recalling how coal mining and the steel industry once brought great wealth to the Charleroi area but largely vanished in the structural changes of the 1970s and 1980s.
Now there is a sense of being adrift, says Buissart, for whom the recession has a peculiar upside: He actually uses the ugliness of Charleroi as a gimmick for his "City Safari" tours. By contrast, the northern half of Belgium, Flanders, is doing very well, and it's this disparity that also fuels Magnette's new popularity, he thinks. The mayor touched an extra chord with many disillusioned Walloons with his opposition of CETA, says Buissart. "Many people think they have found a leader. They long for identity."