Outgoing Brussels Finance Minister Sven Gatz (Open VLD) does not want to form a majority in the Brussels Government with Team Fouad Ahidar, he said in his weekly blog.
On Thursday, Ahidar (a former Vooruit MP in Brussels) told Belga News Agency he had heard informally from Open VLD that the party did not want to form a government with him. In his blog on Friday, Gatz now confirmed this.
Gatz was on a list together with Fouad Ahidar in 1999, but the Open VLD politician has now said that Ahidar "moved a bit more to the left and a lot more towards religion over the years," adding that "it is his right, but it is not my cup of tea. So forming a majority with his 'Team' is not on my list."
In his blog, Gatz raises the question of whether Team Fouad Ahidar has "broken into" the Dutch-speaking people living in Brussels by having recruited French-speaking votes.
Shaking things up
For Gatz, there have been three moments in history when the Dutch-language group in Brussels was shaken up.
In 1971, the FDF-Flemish people (French-speakers who deliberately acquired a Dutch-language identity card to create linguistic confusion) caused a fuss in the Brussels Agglomeration Council; and around 2000 when former police commissioner Johan De Mol tried to make Vlaams Belang as strong as possible in Brussels with a mass of French-language votes.
"And now Fouad is shaking things up. Actually, those shakes each time reflect the pain point of that moment in Brussels society: first the language battle, then the pull to the right and now the return of God (in all his guises) in politics," Gatz said.
He sees two solutions: language-mixed lists with guaranteed representation of Dutch speakers, "but then you are dependent on the French-speaking parties for list-making" or a 'Brussels vote' which would give every Brussels citizen a second vote for a candidate in the other language group. In either case, the number of Brussels MPs could be reduced to 60 or 50 (instead of 89 now).
