Watch video of the booing

To be Miss Belgium you need two essential assets. Unfortunately for the French-speaker Alizée Poulicek, 20, her beauty contest triumph was marred when she came up one short: she revealed an inability to communicate in Dutch, the country's other main language.

Ms Poulicek was booed by the audience in Antwerp, in the Flemish north where Dutch is spoken, in a sign of the heightened tension between them and the francophones from the south of the divided nation.

Belgium's warring politicians have been unable to form a government since elections on June 10 and, with no solution in sight, Guy Verhofstadt, the defeated Flemish Liberal Prime Minister, has been asked by King Albert to form an interim government. Mr Verhofstadt was even given emergency powers to sign the European Reform Treaty in Lisbon last week.

Belgium's deep political crisis springs from the way that parties are organised purely along linguistic lines, with no love lost between the victorious Flemish Christian Democrats and their French-speaking ideological counterparts. Ms Poulicek's inability to express her desire to bring world peace in Dutch had the Flemish newspapers in a frenzy. “Miss Belgium does not speak Dutch,” screamed Het Laatste Nieuws yesterday.

The paper observed that the “community crisis in our country has insinuated itself into even the lightest sector”. Ms Poulicek's victory “is not going down well,” it added.

The francophone newspaper La Libre Belgique noted that Miss Belgium was not tweetalig — the Dutch word for bilingual — to highlight increasing Flemish demands that all Belgians in the public eye should speak the majority language.

Ms Poulicek, the daughter of a Czech father and a Belgian mother, is no slouch when it comes to languages and speaks Czech, French and English. She spent much of her life in the Czech Republic and came back to Belgium only six years ago, where she lives in the French-speaking city of Huy. She is now taking Dutch lessons.

“I have to try, learn more,” she told VRT network in halting Dutch. She continued in French: “I spoke almost no Dutch when I started this adventure.”

She told a French-language newspaper last month that if she won she would be proud to represent Belgium. Asked about the crisis in the Government, she added: “It is like a marriage. Everything cannot always be rosy but you always have to compromise so that it works. The two halves of the country complement each other.”

Dutch-speaking Flemings make up six million of the 10.5 million Belgians. Most of the rest are francophones.

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