The Green Dragon pouts through her civic duty

No big trips with my mother this weekend, because I had to vote in the Europeans on Sunday morning. It's obligatory here and I'd registered in a fit of civic duty a few weeks ago. I generally have some hesitation about voting in places that don't belong to me for whatever reason, but Jesus on His stick knows I spend enough time complaining about the special calvary that is living in Europe, and I pay a tidy chunk of taxes, though being a nom-dom not all that much, really . . . nonetheless, I voted.

Polls were open from 8h to 15h here, and on the understanding that Belgians are pathologically incapable of handling any sort of event that involves any sort of systematic processing of anything even with the benefit of five years' notice, I showed up at my local shortly after the doors opened. Well, not really my local. For some intensely annoying reason, my voting station was a twenty-minute walk from our flat, and I passed two other voting stations on the way . . . and later in the afternoon saw another up the road, rather than down, that was roughly a three-minute walk away . . . that early on a weekend morning, it makes a fucking difference. Trust me.

So grumbling I rolled up to the distant voting station at roughly 8h10 in the morning, and proceeded to wait for half an hour to vote for the green party. Actually in Francophone and Germanophone Belgium, it's called Ecolo, a rather lame name compared to the Flemish Belgian green party, the simple yet cheerful Groen!. Yes. The exclamation point is part of its name. And yes. There are two green parties in Belgium, just as there are essentially two of every party, because the Flems and the Loons will not speak each other's language, the Flems out of pride and frustration (most of them speak French reasonably well, but have an angry history with it) and the Loons out of sheer fucking pig ignorance. It is a nonsense, nonsense, stupid political and linguistic national system that makes Canada look like the Utopia of Bicultural Relations. Which it ain't.

But my point is that I waited in line for half an hour to vote for the green party. In the office itself there were five voting booths, and eight people manning the desk processing the electorate. In the half-hour that I waited, one person voted at a time. Absolute fucking gas factory. And of course it was because the desk of seven processing people (the eighth was supervising the line, making sure nobody was cutting or bribing, I suppose) only processed one person at a time.

The first person announced the electoral number of each voter. The second collected the voter's identification papers. The third and fourth crossed them off two lists, I assume one for the European and one for the civic elections, which were running concurrently and which I'm not allowed to vote in. The fifth handed the voter a magnetic card to use with the electronic voting machine. The sixth instructed the voter how to put the magnetic card into the collection box after voting, because the wrong sticker had been affixed to the slot, and the seventh handed back the voter's identification papers. But of course periodically an aged voter unused to the somewhat convoluted electronic voting process or someone who had never done it before ran into difficulties, and one of the processing people would have to rush to the booth and help them, which would jam up the works completely for the duration.

Sigh.

At least I got out of there in half an hour. Later in the day when Mum and I were out and about, we saw lines at the different voting stations stretching far out onto the streets, including in the Grande Place, which all the tourists were fascinated by. And that on one of the most wretchedly cold and wet June 7ths I've seen in my thirty years of existence. Geez, as they say, Louise. Nonetheless today I'm pleased about how it all went. The green political movement boosted its showing across Europe and here in Belgium. The continent is going a little too fascist and apathetic these days for the mighty greenwash I was hoping for, but considering everything else that wasn't right-wing went to pot I guess it's the best one can hope for in a bullocksy situation.