The Independent
They do things differently in Belgium. The country has finally chosen a prime minister after 535 days of caretaker government, smashing all previous European and world records. Elio Di Rupo, sworn in by King Albert II yesterday, is the first openly gay leader of a European Union country.
Yet more startling in Belgian terms, he is the first French speaker since 1979 to lead the country, in which 60 per cent are Dutch-speaking. He is a left-wing prime minister in a country that votes heavily to the
right.
Elio Di Rupo was born on 18 July 1951 in a squatters’ camp for Italian immigrants in Morlanwelz. His mother and father, landless peasants with six other children, had headed north to find work. When Elio was a year old, his father was run over and killed by a truck. His three brothers were placed in an orphanage while his mother raised him and his three sisters on £6 a month.
“My life is a fairytale,” he told a journalist, Francis Van de Woestyne, in a biography. “You could not make it up. With nothing [my mother] gave us happiness. On celebration days she would buy sandwiches that she cut in
two.”
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