Nowhere but Up

Belgians agreed that the time had come for a change--almost any change. The empire was gone, the nation still bitterly divided by the fratricidal year-end strike set off by the austerity measures designed to make up for the $215 million a year that Belgium had been accustomed to extracting from the Congo. The new year saw the freakish collapse of a slag heap near Liege, burying six homes and eleven persons. It also brought the worst air disaster in Belgian history, a Sabena jet crash that killed 73. In anger over the Congo, often under Communist leadership, Belgian embassies and consulates were being looted and burned around the world. In the streets of Brussels, pro-Lumumbist demonstrators tried to march on Congolese Army recruiting centers; others, carrying banners declaring ENOUGH HUMILIATION WITHOUT REACTION, in retaliation mobbed the U.A.R. and Russian embassies. Last week the government of Premier Gaston Eyskens, a dapper economics professor, collapsed. King Baudouin dissolved Parliament and called elections for March 26.

The issue that finally toppled Eyskens was the same austerity program that set off the year-end strike. Eyskens' Social Christians, aware that elections were near, agreed to go on with the tough new tax law, but wanted to hold off on plans to clean up Belgium's vast and rickety system of health, welfare and retirement plans. Eyskens' partners in the coalition Cabinet, the ultraconservative Liberals, insisted on putting through both halves of austerity at once. They offered their resignations, and the Cabinet fell.

As the center and biggest party in Belgium, the Social Christians are likely to turn up in whatever coalition emerges after March 26. But the current guess was that their new partners would be the Socialists rather than the Liberals, and that Eyskens would be replaced as Premier, perhaps by the Social Christians' party president, a tough, ambitious lawyer named Theo Lefevre, 47.

The Socialists, aware that their bitter strike had lost them face with Belgium's basically conservative shopkeepers and housewives, pinned their hopes on Paul-Henri Spaak, who resigned his post as NATO Secretary-General to return to Belgian politics. Last week he picked up a Medal of Freedom in Washington from President Kennedy and rushed into the fray. His broad face loomed from Socialist posters all over Belgium, and party workers declared that as a moderate, and a notable orator, he was just the man to counteract the alarm produced in staid Belgian voters by rabble-rousing Andre Renard, whose strikers had kept the nation paralyzed for five weeks and cost the economy an estimated $150 million.

Most ordinary Belgians just hoped that somebody could somehow bring peace and quiet back again.

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