What's Up With Belgium?

I had previously heard mention of Belgium's difficulty in forming a government, but the story dropped off of my radar.  I didn't realize that after more than a year, they still didn't have one in place.  As Bloomberg points out (h/t Yves Smith's nc links), a government might come in handy:

Expansion in Belgium's gross domestic product slowed in the second quarter. The benchmark Bel20 stock-market index is down nearly 20 percent since May 2. Yields on Belgian 10-year bonds rose to 4.54 percent Thursday, the highest in two and a half years, and the premium investors demanded to hold those bonds over German bunds reached a euro-era record of 218 basis points, according to Bloomberg data. Business confidence has been declining for months.
This might sound like garden-variety dysfunction in the euro-zone. But in Belgium's case, economic woes are complicated by a surpassingly strange political stalemate. Since elections held on June 13, 2010, Belgium's political parties have been unable to form a coalition, reflecting deepening divisions between Dutch-speaking northerners and French-speaking southerners that may be pushing the country toward a breakup. The Economist Intelligence Unit reckoned July 1 that Belgium is the "least stable country in the EU" and saw no resolution to the impasse in sight.
This would remain a mere curiosity for the rest of the world, except that it'll be awfully hard for Belgium to grapple with its worrisome debt levels without a strong federal government -- or any federal government. Belgium's budget deficit is a modest 3.3 percent of GDP, but its debt-to-GDP ratio is the third highest in the EU. Standard & Poor's estimates a one-in-three chance of a downgrade on its credit rating.

I would guess that a breakup of Belgium would be used as evidence for the claim by anti-immigration forces in the United States that no nation has ever been successful as a bilingual state.  While the folks of Quebec have threatened a breakup of Canada, I generally consider that nation to be a successful and stable country.  I generally point to Switzerland as a successful state, but it, in fact, is trilingual (quadlingual if you count Romansh), so maybe two languages make a country less stable than one, three or four.  Anyway, I doubt that it matters, as facts have little to do with right-wing mass emails.