Because I know you are on the edge of your seats: our mayor lost his bid for a seventh six-year term in yesterday’s elections. His independent (but backed by the Liberals) bloc got only five seats, with the separatist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) topping the poll as they did in much of Flanders and getting six seats. They will now control the council in alliance with the Christian Democrats (CD&V) and the Greens, who won five and three seats respectively. The Socialists (sp.a) won the other two.

The answers to my question about train services came from, in order, 1) N-VA, 2) the outgoing mayor, 3) CD&V, 4) a smaller group who failed to win any seats, 5) the Greens and finally 6) sp.a. Despite their late reply, sp.a made the best impression on me and I voted for them; until then I had been inclined to support the outgoing mayor both on the basis of his answer and to decrease the likelihood of N-VA winning.

(I should say that I am actually pretty agnostic on the question of splitting up Belgium, but I don’t like parties who make it clear that they are not interested in representing me because I am not Flemish enough, and those parties tend to be on the separatist side of the debate.)

I am very unimpressed with the local Greens, who sent me the worst reply and are now in coalition with hardline separatists, but at provincial level I voted for their list; their candidate here in the last parliamentary elections got my support and has stuck to her principles as far as I can tell from Twitter.

The papers are of course full of the implications for Belgium. I hope the federal government serves out its full term – after all, it’s not the first time in history that mid-term second-order elections have favoured the opposition – but I hope also that people are already considering the likely lay of the land in the next Belgian parliament. (Whose Senate, incidentally, will be shorn of both hereditary and directly elected members.)