The Royal Question

Some 5,600,000 Belgians went to the polls this week to elect a new Parliament. They cast their ballots with Belgian calm; but one incident in Brussels revealed the social tension beneath the surface.

Near the royal palace, septuagenarian Queen Mother Elisabeth approached a voting booth. For a moment she fumbled for her glasses in her handbag. Housemaid Juliette Deemes shouted: "Let Leopold come back and get a good kick in the backside!" From indignant bystanders rose countercries "Vive la Reine!"

Though the housemaid plainly did not know it, she and the Queen Mother, who tends to patronize Belgium's Communists, probably saw eye to eye about the election's dominant issue. That issue was "the royal question": should the Queen Mother's exiled son, King Leopold III, be recalled to the throne from which he had been barred by Parliament in 1945?

"To Consult the People." In the bustling campaign preceding election day, Belgium's leading party, the Christian Socialists (Roman Catholics) had borne the Leopoldist banner. They counted on the backing of Catholic Flemings, who are partisans of Leopold's handsome commoner wife, Flemish Mary Liliane.

The Leopoldist argument was made by the Catholic ex-Premier Paul van Zeeland: "The Belgian is a man who likes things in their right places. At the bottom of every Belgian heart is the feeling that the royal question has not been put in its right place . . . We believe the King should come back, but, of course, only if most of the people want him back . . . We want to consult the people."

If they won a majority, either in their own right or with the help of dissident pro-Leopold Liberals, the Catholics promised to call for a popular "advisory" referendum on the royal question. No one seemed to doubt that Leopold would get a majority in such a plebiscite.

The anti-Leopoldist big gun was Socialist Premier Paul-Henri Spaak. Boomed Spaak: "The referendum would not be held without fighting in Belgium."

A Tough Decision. This week, after the votes were counted, Leopold's chances of returning home were still doubtful. The Catholics missed by three votes the 107 needed for a clear majority of the Lower Chamber. Probably more than three Liberals would be willing to join with them in voting for a plebiscite on Leopold. The Catholics, however, would rather govern in continued coalition with the Socialists (66 deputies) than with the Liberals (30 deputies). On the whole, the election represented an anti-Marxist swing. The rightist Liberal Party made the largest gain, and the Communists suffered the sharpest loss (from 23 seats to 12). Even so, the election was so close that the Catholics would have a tough decision to make on whether to put "the royal question" up to the people.

At his villa, Le Reposoir, in Switzerland's Pregny, King Leopold listened to the radio news on the election, broke the tension once to go swimming with Mary Liliane. He wanted to come back, but was enough of a Belgian himself not to hurry.

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