HALLE, Belgium — Leafy Victor Mertens Street hardly looks like a front line, yet it's on these byways that Belgians are fighting a language battle.
The rivalries that used to erupt in riots in city centers have calmed and moved to the 'burbs as homeowners flee crowded French-speaking Brussels for a quieter, cheaper life in the Dutch-speaking towns around the capital.
"A little paradise" is how this Flemish town is viewed by Juan Gonzalez, a French speaker from Brussels who moved here a decade ago and sometimes prunes trees with his Dutch-speaking neighbor.
But many people on both sides of Belgium's language divide have a different view of this new diversity. They are busting for a fight based on electoral laws that have evolved in an effort to cool the bitter, age-old rivalry between this small nation's two main ethnic groups, Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons.
The battle over Halle is rooted in one of the great idiosyncrasies of Belgian political life: Most Flemish districts are limited to Dutch-speaking political parties, while Walloon areas generally only have French-speaking parties.
The problem with Halle is that although it is a Flemish town, it falls -- by an arcane political quirk -- into a district where French-speaking parties can appear on the ballot. Flemish parties worry that Halle could give Walloons an opening to gain influence in their region and are appealing to a special political panel to extend the Dutch-only electoral rule to the town.
Belgium tries to ease friction between its two rival regions largely by keeping them apart. Decades of painstaking negotiations have steadily given more autonomy to Flanders in the north, with its 6 million Dutch speakers, and Wallonia in the south, with 3.4 million French speakers. Lying between the two is Brussels, officially bilingual but with a predominantly French-speaking population of 1 million.
Since the 1980s, the country has seen a cooling of anger that often erupted into violence and nearly brought on civil war half a century ago.
But hard feelings are evident. Many people in Flanders, a more conservative, Roman Catholic region, grouse that their wealthier service-based economy subsidizes Wallonia, a socialist coal and steel area whose industries declined after World War II. Walloons depict Flemings as narrow-minded and inward-looking.
