HE IS a senior conservative politician, she a young Socialist MP, but it is not only a political clash of allegiances that has turned the love affair between Hendrik Daems and Sophie Pécriaux into such a big scandal in Belgium.

Nor was it the announcement by Daems, 46, that he is divorcing the mother of his five-year-old daughter and having a child by Pécriaux, 38. Their greater crime — strange as it may seem in 21st-century Europe — was loving across a cultural divide between Flemings and Walloons. Daems paid for it last week with his job.

The separation of these two regions — Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia — has been quietly proceeding towards divorce, and the outcry over the affair appeared to suggest that Belgium may be flirting with Balkanisation.

“I wasn’t expecting such a beating,” said Daems, who resigned as president of his parliamentary grouping after accusations that he was “sleeping with the enemy”.

A fervent Fleming separatist, Daems was known for mocking Walloons as “lazy southerners” and supporters were bewildered to see him fall under the spell of one of them. No less surprising was Pécriaux’s infatuation with Daems. “Cupid at his most perverse” was how one commentator summed up the coupling.

“We are living a true love story and the child who will be born from our union is a common project,” said Pécriaux, a hitherto little known MP, talking like a true politician. “He is a man, I am a woman, he is Belgian, me too. Isn’t it normal?” The answer, in fact, is no.

If more people followed the example of Daems and Pécriaux there would not be a problem, but only 1% of marriages in this country of mussels and chips are between Flemings and Walloons. They have been bickering with each other ever since Belgium split off from the Netherlands in 1830.

Language has been a key issue but battle has also ranged from money — Flanders is a lot richer than Wallonia — to who can justly claim stilt-walking as their cultural tradition. Both do.

Civil war was narrowly averted almost half a century ago but the two groups have continued to lead ever more separate lives as years of negotiations have given increasing autonomy to the 6m Flemings and 3.4m Walloons.

Today they might as well be different countries, with the mainly French-speaking Brussels lying in between. They have their own flags and their own parliaments, political parties and radio and television stations.

In Flanders, public libraries must ensure that three-quarters of their books are in Dutch or risk losing their funding. To qualify for public housing, applicants must be able to speak Dutch.

Besides stilt-walking, Walloons and Flemings still have King Albert in common. The army, social security and railway systems are also national affairs. In other respects the divorce is so far reaching that some political analysts have wondered how long Belgium, which celebrated its 175th anniversary in a subdued manner last year, can endure.

The Belgian national parliament is one of the few places where Flemings and Walloons meet, even if their exchanges are not always friendly. It was here that romance blossomed between Daems, a Liberal party MP — although the party is more conservative than liberal — and Pécriaux, a Socialist.

Daems, a former telecommunications minister, need not have worried about offending Belgian mores by impregnating a woman other than his wife: nobody in Belgium seems to care much about children being born out of wedlock.

“Daems is a separatist who is militating for the total autonomy of Flanders, but his behaviour is exactly the opposite of what he says,” complained Marc Lits, professor of journalism at the Catholic university of Louvain in Wallonia.

Le Soir, a Francophone newspaper, revealed the affair under the headline “Idyll in parliament” and there was more than a touch of schadenfreude in its coverage of Daems’s resignation. “He likes to caricature us Walloons as lazy unemployed people,” said Béatrice Delvaux, Le Soir’s editor-in-chief, referring to Wallonia’s unemployment rate of 18.5%, more than double that of Flanders.

Not everybody was unhappy, however. The couple have received numerous congratulatory e-mails. “This is the solution to all our inter-communal feuding,” said one. Perhaps they should start a new party.

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