The Council Nobody Stood For
Belgium's German-speaking Community has about 78,000 people, nine communes and a parliament whose decrees carry the same force as a Flemish one. In 2019 it handed a permanent share of its agenda to twenty-four citizens chosen by lot, which no legislature anywhere had done before.
The parliament of the German-speaking Community of Belgium sits in a converted sanatorium on a hill above Eupen, a town of about twenty thousand people twenty minutes from the German border. Twenty-five members are elected to it every five years, on the same day as the European elections. It legislates in German, which is Belgium's third official language, for roughly 78,000 people spread across nine communes and some 850 square kilometres of farmland, forest and peat bog. Its decrees have the same legal force as those of the Flemish parliament, which speaks for six and a half million.
On 25 February 2019 that parliament voted unanimously for a decree with no precedent anywhere. It created a permanent Citizens' Council of twenty-four people drawn by lot, with a standing right to decide what the parliament would be made to discuss. Not a one-off panel, not an advisory exercise with an end date — a body written into law, with its own secretariat and a budget line, sitting alongside the elected chamber indefinitely. The OECD catalogued it the following year. Brussels and Paris have since built versions of their own.
Nine communes, three sovereignties
This corner of Belgium was German until the Treaty of Versailles, which transferred the districts of Eupen and Malmedy in 1920. The transfer was confirmed by a consultation that has satisfied nobody since. Registers were opened for six months under a Belgian High Commissioner, Baron Herman Baltia, and anyone opposed to becoming Belgian had to walk in and sign their name and address in public. Of roughly 33,000 people eligible, 271 signed. The League of Nations accepted the outcome in September 1920. German historians have called it a coerced formality ever since; Belgian accounts point out that the region had been Habsburg and Prussian in turn and had no settled national loyalty to violate. Both positions are still in print.
Germany reannexed the territory in May 1940. Several thousand men were conscripted into the Wehrmacht and a great many did not come back, which meant that in 1945 the region returned to a Belgium that regarded it as a security problem. Rehabilitation took decades and it came through the machinery of Belgian federalism rather than through any gesture: the language laws of 1963 fixed a German-language area, the first state reform of 1970 created three cultural communities including a German one, a council followed in 1973 and was directly elected from 1974, and in 1984 it acquired a government and the power to make decrees. Since then the Walloon Region has repeatedly handed down competences that elsewhere belong to a region — employment policy, monument protection, housing, and supervision of its own municipalities. A minority once treated as a loyalty risk now runs almost everything that touches it, and since 2017 it has called itself Ostbelgien on its own letterhead.
The 541 days
The idea it adopted came out of the failure of the machinery around it. The federal election of June 2010 produced a deadlock that ran 541 days before a government was sworn in — a record for a democracy at the time, and a period in which the country was administered by caretakers while its politicians argued over the constitutional relationship between its language communities. In November 2011, in the middle of that, several hundred people drawn at random from the population met in Brussels for a citizens' summit organised by a group calling itself the G1000. One of its instigators, the writer David Van Reybrouck, published a book two years later arguing that elections were a poor and historically recent method of selecting who deliberates, and that drawing lots — the Athenian method, and the one still used for juries — was the older and in some respects the better one.
An election decides who governs. A lottery decides who is in the room while it is being worked out. Ostbelgien wrote the second question into law and left the first one exactly where it was.
What the decree actually does
The Citizens' Council has twenty-four members, each serving eighteen months, with a third replaced every six months so that the body is permanent and its membership never is. Its members are people who have already sat on a Citizens' Assembly, so nobody arrives cold. The Council does not write policy. It chooses subjects — between one and three a year — and convenes an Assembly of between twenty-five and fifty people drawn by lot from the population register to work on each of them across several weekends, with experts called in, professional facilitation, attendance fees, and travel and childcare paid. Being drawn is an invitation, not a summons.
What happens next is the part that makes it more than a consultation. The recommendations go to the relevant parliamentary committee, which must debate them in public with members of the Assembly present, and the government must state what it intends to do about each one and give its reasons where it intends to do nothing. It must then report back on implementation. None of it is binding. That was deliberate: a binding citizens' body would be a second legislature with no answer to the question of who it answers to, and the drafters chose an obligation to respond in public over an obligation to obey.
What it has and has not changed
The first Assembly, in 2019, took on care work and the shortage of nursing staff. Later rounds have looked at inclusive schooling and at housing — the subjects a community of 78,000 actually argues about, which is either the modest reality of devolved competence or evidence that the mechanism is kept away from anything that matters, depending on who is describing it. The recurring criticism is the non-binding clause: a government that must only explain itself can explain itself indefinitely. The recurring defence is that a duty to answer in public, on the record, with the people who wrote the recommendation sitting in the room, is a harder thing to face down than it sounds, and that no other parliament has agreed to face it at all.
The other honest number is the response rate. A few per cent of those invited say yes. That is normal for sortition everywhere and it does not by itself wreck the statistics, since the draw is stratified afterwards, but it means the pool is smaller than the population and self-selected at the last step. Copying has happened anyway. The Brussels parliaments introduced mixed deliberative committees of fifteen elected members and forty-five drawn citizens from 2019; Paris established a permanent citizens' assembly in 2021. What a visitor sees is much smaller than any of that: a hill town with a bilingual bakery, a parliament in an old hospital, and the bog above it where a Belgian commissioner built a stone stair in 1923 so that his new territory could claim seven hundred metres. The same nine communes whose objection was once counted by 271 public signatures now decide by lottery who gets to set the agenda.