Belgium's Prime Minister Bart De Wever (N-VA) is furious about a potential Brussels Government being formed without his own Flemish nationalist party.
Since Tuesday morning, Brussels negotiators have been in a conclave to form a government: formator Georges-Louis Bouchez (MR) invited PS (socialists), Les Engagés (centrists) on the French-speaking side, and Groen (greens), Anders (liberals), Vooruit (socialists) and CD&V (Christian Democrats) on the Dutch-speaking side.
These seven parties have a majority in both language groups, but N-VA – the Prime Minister's party – is being resolutely excluded.
"Everyone is being screwed over in Brussels, but so am I," said De Wever on the HLN podcast 'Het Rapport van de Wetstraat'. "I will soon have to submit my report to the EU, and the catastrophe in Brussels is included in those figures."
"European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is not going to say: 'I'll forgive you those billions in deficit, because it's the fault of those Brussels bunglers'. No, she is going to tell me to figure it out. So I just have to undergo this all."
The fact that his party is not included in the ongoing conclave is striking; the negotiations were deadlocked for over a year, precisely because of N-VA's potential involvement. The Francophone socialists (PS) refused to enter into a government that also included the Flemish nationalists, while the Dutch-speaking liberals (Anders) refused to enter into a government without them.
More of the same?
At the start of the week, however, Anders' party leader Frédéric De Gucht suddenly changed his mind. After nearly 20 months of refusal from his party to drop its demand over the inclusion of N-VA, he has now accepted the invitation to take part in the conclave after all.
"De Gucht would do better to rename his party 'The Same': grovelling before PS," De Wever said, alluding to the liberals' new party new 'Anders', which means "different" in Dutch.
For De Wever, it is "unacceptable" that Anders is now willing to sit down at the table without his party, "solely to please PS" – which has always said it never wants to govern with N-VA.
"It is like 2010 all over again," said De Wever. "PS's incredible cynicism is to say: 'mal gouverner, non gouverner,' [saying] our voters are not losing sleep over this, and we are simply waiting for the others to be cooked, and then we will get our way'."
He pointed the finger at De Gucht, and accuses him of using the Brussels formation as a campaign to become party leader.
In the podcast, he said that he is "stunned" by De Gucht's cynicism. "The Flemish liberals bear a crushing responsibility for the financial derailment of Brussels. They have always provided the Budget Minister, and now I hear De Gucht say on TV yesterday that he is entering into the talks because he has been reassured."
The seven parties (each with four negotiators) have been locked up in negotiations this week in the historic building of the University Foundation in Ixelles, and claim they will not leave until they have reached a government agreement.
