Talk:Royal question/Archives/2018/May

On the referendum

I have two remarks about the referendum part of the article.

First of all I think it should be made clear that organising a referendum in Belgium at the time had no constitutional basis so the result of the referendum, no matter what the outcome, could never form a legal basis to decide on the king's eventual return or not. As a result the remark that the result of the referendum was undecisive is somewhat awkward. I think it is important to point out the non-binding character of the referendum, because it is one of the reasons why it was possible for the governement to legally not take into account the outcome of the referendum.

Secondly, when making abstraction of the fact that the outcome of the referendum has no binding legal worth, one can hardly state that the result was indecisive when you have a 58% yes versus 42% no result nationwide, by comparison what would one then call for instance the result of the Brexit referendum (52% yes/48% no also with regional differences). I rather think the outcome is a clear yes but mitigated in the sense that there were opposing results for Flanders, Brussels, and some provinces of Wallonia. Boerkevitz (talk) 09:39, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

These are good points. You should consider editing that section. I suspect the results are characterized as "indecisive" because it underscored the geographic split underlying the issue. (And Brexit is not a good counterexample: a more indecisive result would be hard to imagine. I'm still amazed the PM took it as a mandate to proceed.) -- Elphion (talk) 16:13, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

"Indecisive" is the concept that comes out of all the WP:RS on the subject. It's not WP:OR. —Brigade Piron (talk) 20:11, 2 May 2018 (UTC)