World Notes Belgium

The opposition Socialists, echoing Ronald Reagan's 1980 challenge to Jimmy Carter, put up campaign posters asking, ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO? Incumbent Prime Minister Wilfried Martens, 49, countered with his own billboards urging NO CHANGE OF POLICIES. When the ballots were tallied, it was found that a majority of the nearly 7 million Belgians who went to the polls had chosen continuity over change. Martens' four-party, center-right coalition won 115 seats in the 212-member Chamber of Representatives, up from 113 seats held previously. A Christian Democrat from the country's Dutch- speaking Flemish region, Martens now has a slightly stronger mandate to continue the policies he began upon taking office in 1981. Among them: the deployment in Belgium of 48 U.S.-made, nuclear-armed cruise missiles by 1987. Sixteen of the weapons are already in place.

Martens' victory appeared to contradict recent opinion polls showing that as many as three-quarters of all Belgians, especially young leftist voters, are opposed to the cruise-missile deployment. In the end, however, domestic concerns appeared to take precedence, with voters choosing to continue Martens' program of curbing government spending and phasing out inefficient industries.