Equality by lot

An article by Eric Deffet published in Belgian Le Soir on June 14th, 2023.

The Walloon parliament has approved the creation of a first deliberative commission with a mix of allotted citizens and elected officials. Creating a mirror-in-mirror situation, this commission will discuss… the creation of a permanent commission to serve alongside the legislature.

Several years after Brussels, Wallonia is getting ready to launch its own experimentation with a first deliberative commission mixing elected officials and allotted citizens. The legal framework has long existed and the green light for a real life test has been given on Wednesday in the assembly. It responds to demands for citizen participation and transparency following the revelations on the dysfunction of the regional parliament. The participants will be drawn from the National Register: 30 citizens and as many additional fill-ins, who will have to represent the Walloon population.

What will this citizen body discuss? Quite simply, it will discuss democracy and citizen participation… This theme has been proposed by the association Cap Démocratie which has collected 2,000 signatures in order to place this proposal in front of parliament [see here, -YG]. The proposal suggests imitating the model of the German-speaking community: a creation of a permanent citizen commission which, alongside the legislature, would submit proposals to the government.

In Namur [the Walloon capital] the initiative was unanimously approved. In the opposition, the PTB [Parti du Travail de Belgique, The Labor Party of Belgium] has shown reserve, which is shared elsewhere: this could easily turn out to be a flop. There is nothing worse than a deliberative commission which, having no binding power, goes nowhere and feeds the “democratic fatigue”, the exact opposite of the effect aimed at. The first meetings should take place after the summer.

Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Sortition |