Frustrated by the inertia which has settled over attempts to reform the Belgian political and legal system since a shocking series of paedophile murders 18 months ago, the father of one of the teenage victims has formed a political party to tackle the government.
Mr Pol Marchal, a bearded, bespectacled teacher of maladjusted children, used the backroom of a small cafe in the east Flanders town of Hasselt for a press conference yesterday to announce the foundation of his Party for New Politics.
Mr Marchal said the country's traditional parties had failed: "Our country is sick and the old parties are incapable of solving its problems. The only solution is an entirely new party devoid of the old vices, which can be founded on principles such as credibility, openness, honesty and equity," he said.
Such is the ramshackle nature of the movement - membership so far five - that Mr Marchal and his friends could not afford to hold their press conference in Brussels.
Even the party's name was only chosen the night before the launch, largely because its initials PNP would form an acronym the same in French, Flemish and German, all three official languages in Belgium's linguistically divided society.
Nevertheless, up to 100 journalists struggled to squeeze into the room for an announcement widely seen as having the potential to rock the country's complacent and cosy elite.
The wave of emotion and recrimination still sweeping Belgium about its despised political system and public figures is so strong that one recent poll put potential support for a reformist party at up to 10 per cent.
Around 300,000 Belgians - 3 per cent of the population - marched through Brussels in October, 1996, to protest at the police and judicial incompetence uncovered by the paedophile scandal, which broke the previous August with the discovery of the bodies of four girls and the rescue of two more.
One of the bodies was that of Mr Marchal's 19-year-old daughter, An, who had disappeared with a friend while on holiday at Ostend in 1995 and was uncovered a year later buried under a shed in the back garden of a house owned by Charleroi builder Marc Dutroux.
Although Belgium's prime minister, Mr Jean-Luc Dehaene, swiftly promised reforms to the system, little has changed and politicians have settled back into their old routines.
Dutroux and alleged conspirators arrested with him, including his wife, remain in prison with no prospect of trial much before the end of this year.
If the laborious magistrates' inquiry into the killings drags out much longer, Belgium's trial of the century may well coincide with next year's general election, which would be bad news for Mr Dehaene.
Astonishingly for such a divided and parochial country, Mr Marchal, who is Flemish, appears to be gaining support in Frenchspeaking Wallonia, where most of the paedophile victims lived and the murders occurred.
Significantly, the other parents of dead and missing children have steered clear of his crusade, saying they do not want to get involved in politics. Potentially worse, many of those who have told pollsters they would support the new party appear to be from the disgruntled right, who may not be too happy when they discover Mr Marchal's message of anti-racism and brotherly love.
Mocking the system further, Brussels police yesterday announced that human bones found buried three months ago in the cellar of Andras Pandy, a Hungarian-born pastor, cannot be those of his two wives and four of his six children as previously thought.
DNA tests suggest the fragments belong to up to 10 other unknown people, possibly middleaged Hungarian women Pandy is believed to have enticed to Brussels with promises of marriage. As with other crimes, police were warned about Pandy six years ago but took no action.
The clergyman's surviving adult daughter, Agnes, has given investigators a graphic description how she helped kill the rest of the family, dissolve them in acid and dump the remains in a local canal or in sacks outside a nearby abbatoir.