I'm not living in Belgium myself (and anyway I always do vote) but probably a fine (of either up to 25eur when it's an "overtreding" (small offense) or higher amount).
According to wikipedia absentism is on the increase anyway in recent times:
It - according to the same source - seems to have doubled in the last 30 years, especially in larger towns.

All right, I'll rephrase my question: what happens if None of the Above wins?

I dare say here at least (maybe elsewhere too), they would have to recall the election due to not enough participation.

Which would be a very good thing. Why? Because it would send the bastards a message loud and clear that people simply aren't going to take it anymore. Then people could say, now this is what we want, and you bastards are going to do it, or guess what's going to happen come next election? What better way to wake the bastards up... Time to get rid of the tyrants!

That's what needs to happen if people want to see any real change. Viva revolution!!!

Reading up on the election outcome... so populism won once again.

I think there's more to it than that. Constituencies that have been staunch labour supporters for decades suddenly vote in a conservative. It could possibly be "un"populism losing.

'First past the post' won again - more people probably voted against them, than for them, but they still 'win'.

No doubt the results would have been quite different, if we had proportional representation, but I don't have any figures.

Yeah, would be nice to live in a democracy.

There is no chance of change, there's too much money at steak for us to have an actual democracy.

It's not just Brexit, although that played a major part. A former Labour minister summed it up on the radio next day, saying that England (not, note, the UK) is conservative with a small "c" and if the Labour party turns Marxist, then a lot of people will turn Conservative with a large "C". It happened with Foot and it's happened with Corbin. If the labour party wants an election victory, they need to look to the country as a whole, rather than the chattering classes of north London, and they need to repeat the work of Smith and Kinnock and turf out the trots.

When there's so many parties to choose from it would be virtually impossible to get a clear winner on a majority of the votes cast. It's only the minority parties want proportional representation. In our democracy each constituency votes for a candidate and the candidate with the most votes in that constituency wins. How else can you do that?
Otherwise you don't get an individual mp and you've no idea what you're going to get.
In the 19th century there were 2 main parties; Tories and Whigs. Labour was invented and by the 20th century the whigs(liberals) lost popularity and labour became a main contender. That's democracy.

It does look strange though that say SNP get 48 seats for just over a million votes but a party like Lib Dems get only 11 seats for three times as many votes.

There were 31,829,630 votes cast of 47,587,254 registered voters, and of those votes, 13,966,565 were for Johnson's Conservative Party - giving percentages of 43.6% for vs 56.4% against...


See attachments - the second chart is the result of re-allocating the current seats based on vote percentage - of course with true PR there would likely be fewer votes for the main parties, giving a more representative parliament.

Attached Thumbnails

   

The first-past-the-post system was designed to give stable majorities in parliament and individual constituency MPs that people could relate to. With most PR systems, the government is always a coalition, and the public have no way of knowing, when they cast their votes, which other parties their preferred party might decide to go into coalition with afterwards or what they are prepared to give those parties in exchange for their support. Everything is decided between politicians in smoke-filled rooms.

If you have the most perfectly proportional system, known as the Party List, all the candidates are party hacks who are put on the list for being good boys. The system also allows a few big towns to gang up together and outvote the rest of the country. That of course is why urban liberals love it. And you end up without a local MP who can fight your corner.

Single Transferable Vote is a bit better, as you do end up with local MPs of a kind, but they are a group of 2-3 MPs representing a huge constituency, so they aren't really local. And anyway STV is hugely complicated and opaque and leads to election counts that take days.

I think First Past the Post is probably what Churchill would have called "the least worst alternative".

That's why people need to rise up, and forget about that idea that their favorite political party is going to save them. The REAL problem is that you have interest and lobby groups that fund the major political parties. Nobody gives anyone large sums of $$$ for nothing, anymore than the lobby/interest groups give the political parties $$$ for nothing - they EXPECT something in return, and that's policies designed to look after THEIR interests. So the average person hasn't got a chance, because the average person simply doesn't have millions of dollars to "donate". That's the real problem.

"Proportional representation" isn't any solution, and doesn't change the above.

Rising up and revolution are nothing more than fantasies these days, I think. People are way too narcissistic and insecure to champion any such political cause, and this is partly a result of technological progression and dependence, as well as media influence. The real revolution that needs to take place is inside the psychology of each individual person, and most people are way too far gone for that. How can we have a revolution when people are obsessed with their social media statuses or whether they are non-binary or gender fluid? I often think these issues were invented by the media in order to control people, distract them and to keep them from really seeing what's going on under their eyes.

EDIT: Look at this staff list at Rise Up email, for instance. We can't unite if we are too busy fighting multiple causes which others don't even relate to or understand.