Spaak Urges King Leopold To Abdicate

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27346, 23 March 1950, Page 7

Spaak Urges King Leopold To Abdicate

UP—NZPA—Copyright BRUSSELS, Mar. 21. The former, Socialist Premier, Mr Paul-Henri Spaak, said in an open letter to King Leopold tonight that the Socialist Party would not bow to the majority over the question of King Leopold’s return, because the country’s future was at stake. Mr Spaak urged King Leopold to send his 19-year-old son and heir, Prince Boudouin, back to Belgium and to. step down or else his return would* be opposed by all legal means, including a general strike. Mr Spaak accused King Leopold of listening to “ irresponsible councillors ” whose only merit was to have financed the pre-referendum campaign. < “In the old days instead of working in close collaboration with your Ministers, your Majesty took the advice of some general diplomat or professor, whose wish to please was greater than the will to enlighten,” said Mr Spaak. “Today your Majesty is once again indulging in the same practice, but on a lower level;

“You know, sire, that in our country, a balance between the Flemings, Walloons, and Bruxellois is a difficult thing to achieve—that one must never govern with one against the others, but it is to this that you are condemned today. The capital is against you, the capital where you would have tb live and from where you would have to rule. “ Your Majesty has never liked politicians very much. It was one of the shortcomings of your reign, in our parliamentary regime collaboration between the King and the politicians is indispensable. “ Permit me, sire, to affirm that their sense of the common weal is as great, and their knowledge of ■ the country as certain, as those of men whose only merit until the present is to-be wealthy. “A fundamentally healthy country can stand a political struggle. A country whose King is contested by 43 per cent, of the voters is no longer a healthy country. All the wounds are going to fester: all politics will become more violent; passion will drown wisdom; social order and political peace will be disturbed. Sire, Belgium—its unity and its prosperity —is in danger.” Mr Spaak’s letter was published in the Socialist newspaper, Le People. In the meantime 10,000 workers around Brussels and wharf labourers at Antwerp docks ended their “stopLeopold ” strike today. There are rumours, however, that the General Labour Confederation the most powerful union group in the country —is considering a further wave of strikes to force King Leopold to renounce his claim to the Throne.