What Remains to the King: The Belgian Monarchy and the Function of Unity

Introduction

July 21 commemorates an oath. On 21 July 1831, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg swore before the Chambers to observe the Constitution — the founding gesture of a monarchy that, from the outset, drew its legitimacy solely from the text to which it submitted. One hundred and ninety-five years later, the national day remains attached to that scene, and this is not a matter of indifference: Belgium celebrates not the accession of a king but his subjection to a fundamental law.

The anniversary falls this year in a particular context. On 2 July, the Chamber opened the way to the abolition of the Senate1. Should the operation succeed, the federal legislative power, which Article 36 of the Constitution vests collectively in the King, the Chamber and the Senate2, will be exercised by only two branches. The Crown will find itself alone beside a single assembly. The question of what it still does within that arrangement then ceases to be theoretical.

The aim here is to examine it without the two reflexes that usually clutter the subject. The first defends the monarchy by appeal to tradition, an argument that says nothing about its present usefulness. The second dismisses it as a costly relic, an argument that says nothing about what it occupies. Between the two lies a question of political science: in a state whose mechanisms of integration are weakening, what exactly does an institution do that no longer has power but retains a place?

I. What the law leaves him

One must begin with precision, for the subject lends itself to approximation. The King, in Belgian law, holds no personal power. The rule is laid down in Article 106: no act of the King can take effect unless countersigned by a minister, who thereby becomes responsible for it3. The countersignature is not a formality; it transfers the political responsibility for the act entirely to the minister who appends it. Correlatively, Article 88 provides that the person of the King is inviolable and that his ministers are responsible4. Inviolability and irresponsibility go hand in hand with the absence of any power of his own: that is the price, and the logic, of the system.

The attributions the Constitution enumerates must be read in that light. Article 96 provides that the King appoints and dismisses his ministers5; in practice, he appoints those whom the parties have designated at the close of their negotiations. He sanctions and promulgates laws, without being able to withhold his sanction short of a crisis. He commands the armed forces, over which he exercises no effective command. He concludes treaties, which the government negotiates. Each of these prerogatives, taken in isolation, appears considerable; all are neutralised by the countersignature.

An episode in 1990 showed how far that neutralisation goes. King Baudouin having made known that he could not, in conscience, sanction the law partially decriminalising abortion, the Council of Ministers established his inability to reign within the meaning of Article 93, exercised his powers collectively for the time it took to promulgate the text, after which the Chambers declared the inability at an end6. The solution was criticised by part of the legal doctrine, which saw in it a diverted use of a provision designed for other circumstances. It nonetheless established one thing: a king who refuses to sign does not stop the law; he steps aside while it passes.

The legal picture is therefore clear. The Crown decides nothing. This finding, often presented as an argument against it, is in fact the starting point of the problem, not its solution.

II. What practice has left him

For there remains one domain in which the King acts, and it appears nowhere in the Constitution. The formation of federal governments has been organised, for decades, around a sequence of royal missions: personal consultations conducted by the sovereign, the appointment of an informateur charged with exploring possible coalitions and reporting on them, then of a formateur charged with conducting the negotiation and presenting to the King the team produced by the agreement7. None of these titles has any textual basis. They are conventions, forged by usage, which nothing obliges anyone to respect and which everyone respects.

The scale this apparatus can assume was measured in 2010 and 2011. The five hundred and forty-one days that separated the elections from the formation of a government saw the succession of an informateur, a mediator, an explorer, conciliators, a college of mediators, several formateurs and a royal commissioner8. This series can be read as the symptom of a political class incapable of reaching agreement, and that is not wrong. The fact remains that someone, throughout those eighteen months, went on assigning missions, receiving reports, restarting a process that kept bogging down. That someone had no power of decision. He had a function: to keep open a framework of negotiation that nothing else obliged to remain open.

One should resist turning this into praise. The King resolved none of those crises; the parties resolved them, late, under pressure from the markets and public opinion. Royal intervention does not speed up government formation, as the duration of recent episodes shows well enough. What it provides is more modest and harder to replace: an obligatory point of entry, external to the parties in contention, through which the process must pass and to which each of them accounts.

III. A hypothesis, and its limits

This observation permits a hypothesis that must be formulated with caution. The Brussels-Capital Region has, at the time of writing, been without a government for more than six hundred days9. The formation of a regional executive involves no royal intervention: it plays out among parties, under the authority of an outgoing minister-president handling current affairs, with no instituted third party. The contrast with the federal level, where even the longest crises were eventually resolved, is striking.

It would be imprudent to conclude that the King’s presence explains the difference. The Brussels deadlock has causes of its own, notably the requirement of a majority within each of the two language groups, which multiplies veto points in a fragmented assembly. The comparison suffers, moreover, from a methodological flaw: two cases do not make a series, and the royal variable cannot be isolated from everything else that distinguishes the two levels of government. The hypothesis proves nothing.

It nonetheless points to something. In highly fragmented coalition systems, the difficulty is not only to reach an agreement; it is to sustain a process when none of the parties has an interest in making the first move. The theory of federalism and that of consociational democracies have long emphasised the role of arbitration mechanisms and of actors standing outside the partisan game in segmented societies10. The King, devoid of power but endowed with a position, occupies that place. The pertinent question is not whether he could be replaced — a president without executive power, as in Germany or Italy, would fulfil the same function — but to recognise that the function exists and cannot be abolished without being relocated.

IV. The cost, and what it measures

The financial argument occupies a disproportionate place in public debate, and it deserves to be handled with precision rather than brushed aside. The federal budget devotes some forty-four million euros to the royal function in 2026, an amount covering the endowment of the King and those of the members of the royal family, but also security, the upkeep of the palaces and diplomatic travel11. Since the beginning of the current reign, these lines have been grouped within a single budget programme, which is precisely what makes them knowable12.

This figure settles nothing. Set against the State budget, it is negligible; set against what a ceremonial presidency would cost, it is not obvious that it is much higher. Its real significance lies elsewhere: the monarchy’s budgetary transparency is recent, and it is the product of sustained parliamentary pressure. It illustrates the institution’s actual trajectory, which is not that of a power resisting but that of a function gradually allowing itself to be framed, measured and justified. A monarchy that accepts being audited is no longer quite the same institution as that of 1831.

V. What the monarchical question really asks

The Belgian debate on the monarchy suffers from being framed in terms of regime. Should there be a republic? The question has the merit of clarity and the drawback of missing the essential point. It bears on the form of the head of state, whereas the Belgian problem bears on what holds the country together.

The instruments of federal integration have grown scarce. The political parties have been split along community lines since the 1970s, so that no party stands before the electorate as a whole. The media landscape is largely dissociated. The Senate, conceived in 2014 as a chamber of the federated entities, is on its way to abolition. The leading Flemish nationalist party heads the federal government, and its confederal project makes no mystery of what it ultimately aims at. Within this landscape, the Crown is one of the few institutions not duplicated along community lines.

That is what makes the subject awkward. To defend the monarchy on the ground that it is the last thing held in common is to entrust it with a burden no symbolic institution can carry alone, and to turn the weakness of the other bonds into an argument. Conversely, to abolish it without having organised what would take its place would be to remove a point of support from an edifice that has few, on the precise ground that it has few. Neither position is satisfactory, which is why the debate goes in circles.

Conclusion

There is no simple answer to the question whether the Belgian monarchy is still relevant, and it would be dishonest to offer one. What can be said holds in three propositions.

The first is that the King possesses no power, that this finding is settled, and that it does not suffice to close the discussion. The second is that he nonetheless performs a function — procedural in the formation of governments, symbolic in the representation of the State — and that this function will not disappear with the institution that carries it: it will have to be assumed by something else. The third is that the question of regime — monarchy or republic — is less urgent than that of the mechanisms of integration of a federation that lacks them.

The oath of 1831 subordinated the monarch to the Constitution. One hundred and ninety-five years later, the institution has lost everything it could lose in power and kept a position. Some will judge that position illegitimate in a democracy, and the argument deserves a hearing. Yet no one can claim that it is empty, nor abolish what it occupies without saying what will occupy it next. It is, in the end, the same requirement as the one raised by the abolition of the Senate: to distinguish the institution from the function, and not to mistake tidying up for reform.

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1. See on this point our analysis “The Belgian Senate Facing Its Abolition: From Institution to Function”, 15 July 2026. ↩

2. Belgian Constitution, Art. 36: the federal legislative power is exercised collectively by the King, the Chamber of Representatives and the Senate. ↩

3. Belgian Constitution, Art. 106: no act of the King can take effect unless it is countersigned by a minister, who, by that alone, becomes responsible for it. ↩

4. Belgian Constitution, Art. 88: the King’s person is inviolable; his ministers are responsible. ↩

5. Belgian Constitution, Art. 96, para. 1: the King appoints and dismisses his ministers. ↩

6. Belgian Constitution, Art. 93 (inability to reign); on the episode of April 1990 and the doctrinal controversies it provoked, see the commentaries on Belgian constitutional law relating to this provision. ↩

7. On the functions of informateur and formateur, which have no constitutional basis and arise from practice alone, see CRISP, Vocabulaire politique, entries “informateur” and “formateur”. ↩

8. On the government-formation crisis of 2010–2011 and the succession of royal missions, see in particular the chronicle devoted to that legislature in the journal Pouvoirs, 2011. ↩

9. Situation of the Brussels-Capital Region in the summer of 2026, as reported in the press. ↩

10. See in particular A. Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies, New Haven, Yale University Press, as well as his later work on consociational democracies and coalition systems. ↩

11. General expenditure budget of the federal State, fiscal year 2026, programme relating to the royal endowment and expenditure connected with the royal function. ↩

12. On the grouping of the budget lines relating to the monarchy into a single programme, see the information published by the Belgian Monarchy and the related budgetary commentaries. ↩