Interesting. Are there many alternatives, though, considering that Fianna Fail almost certainly won't be available for the government?

Huh. Here was me thinking Fianna Fail had a Christian ethos - what with them having been dominant all along in the after all very Catholic Ireland, until fairly recently anyway.

And as for "more economically liberal", that's a rather ambiguous statement on an international website. Should I interpret that as more left-wing or more right-wing?

For some reason I had them in my mind as being roughly similar to the German situation - Fine Gael as more right-wing economically but socially progressive, Fianna Fail the reverse. But I see I've got it almost entirely the wrong way around, then.

So is he an Irish citizen or a British one? How he can be a British MP, absentionist or not, if he's an Irish citizen, and vice versa? This is very confusing.

There are, I can never remember, somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 German speakers in Belgium, out of a total population of about eleven million now. Suffice to say, our trilinguality is mostly just a technicality - they're still busy with the process of translating old laws to German, as they'd never gotten around to that before. Still, the German speakers are doing their best to maximize their influence, both by trying to mediate in the current crisis (by virtue of being culturally closer to the Flemish, while living in Wallonia), and by making futile attempts to become a full-fletched fourth region.

As for middle ground, truth be told, not that much, or at least not on the issues at stake. Flemish parties are far more right-wing as a whole. Each party other than the nationalist ones does have a counterpart on the other side of the language border - until the 1960s we had nation-wide parties, but they all split along language lines - but those have been diverging more and more. The Flemish socialists are quite sick of being the victim of the Flemish voters' desire to express their dislike of the Francophone socialists in the only way they can, for instance. The Greens have made valiant attempts throughout this crisis to profile themselves as the only "political family" in which the two parties are on good terms and agree on most things, but even they fundamentally disagree on the big issues causing the political deadlock.

I'm not sure this is even making much sense to you - it really would take a few hours' worth of infodumping to make any outsider understand matters completely, I think.