Belgian PM Leterme announces Belgian plan for EU Presidency

©Belgian Presidency (www.eutrio.be)

Acting Belgian Prime minister, Yves Leterme announced to a packed press conference that the priority for their six month Presidency of the EU council would be a plan to separate the 27 member states into 1,241 linguistic zones and grant them full autonomy. He said he was confident that the plan he described as “achievable, concrete and specific”, could be completed before they hand over to Hungary, or as became apparent, a group of Finno-Ugric speakers.

The bold plan was met with some skepticism, and Leterme said that bilingual people would be classified, “in a disciplined system” according to their mother’s primary language.

When he was asked how this complemented the EU’s motto of “unity  in diversity” he said the first thing to do was to encourage diversity, there would be plenty of time later for “that unity nonsense”.

Leterme announced that the first redrawn borders would be in the former Balkans, saying “we chose that because they had already done much of the heavy lifting”as it were, and the various linguistic groups were “living in a separate unity.”

On hearing the news, Council President Herman Van Rompuy, a Belgian, was characteristically silent.