Belgium's first bilingual party defies establishment[fr][de] 

Philippe Delstanche, the leader of ProBruxsel , compared his party's attempt to introduce bilingual lists as "a trip to Absurdistan". The party registered its lists with the electoral authorities, with some difficulty, on 9 May, but it may still face legal challenges. 

The new party favours a bilingual and cosmopolitan model for the Brussels region, which it says has been taken hostage by linguistic divisions between French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders, the other two regions which dominate Belgium's political life. 

Regional elections are being held across the country on 7 June, alongside European elections. There are three regions in the country: Flanders to the north, Wallonia to the south and Brussels, a bilingual enclave in southern Flanders. 

ProBruxsel members are of the opinion that Brussels inhabitants are being discriminated against on the basis of language, as a result of the division of the country into linguistic communities, which in their view contradicts the reality of multilingual and cosmopolitan Brussels. 

The party's initiators are worried that ongoing attempts to reform the Belgian state mention only two regions or 'linguistic communities', overlooking Brussels as a fully-fledged region. 

In Belgium, political life is segregated between linguistic communities, which more or less correspond with the country's division into regions: residents of Wallonia are constrained by law to vote only for French-speaking parties, while in Flanders, citizens may only vote for Dutch-speaking ones. In the officially bilingual Brussels region, voters can chose between French and Flemish parties, but there is no political force standing for both communities. 

As a result, ProBruxsel had to register two lists with the same name, 'ProBruxsel', for the regional elections, adding the letter 'F' after the name of the French-language list and 'N' after the Dutch-language one. However, this arrangement can still be challenged by courts, Delstanche admits. 

The Bruxsel forum website also seeks to attract the support of English-speaking Brussels citizens, aiming to create "an independent speaker's corner, open to all inhabitants that want to think about the future of their city, before others decide for them". 

The name 'Bruxsel' was chosen by the initiators of the project because it is neither French nor Flemish, and needs no translation. They say that the name refers to the origins of the thousand year-old city, which was first called 'Bruocsella', meaning "a house in a swamp".