The Mouvement Réformateur (MR) on Wednesday evening reiterated its call for large-scale tax reforms, calling on the Government to lower taxes rather than shift them. It also stressed the need for labour reforms, and for linking the two.
“We would have liked to be able to go further in a large-scale tax reform,” the leader of the MR group in the Chamber, Benoît Piedboeuf, said during the debate on the general policy declaration issued on Tuesday by Prime Minister Alexander De Croo.
The liberal parliamentarian called on the government to embark on a “tax down” policy and not a “tax shift.”
In its 2023 budget, the federal government did not include any major tax reform, although, in his general policy speech, Prime Minister Alexander De Croo told the House that the issue was still high on the agenda. He said the Government was asking the Minister of Finance to present to it, by December, a detailed and ambitious first phase of tax reform.
"The objective is to begin the implementation of this reform during this legislature,” the Prime Minister declared.
On Wednesday, the MR group leader urged the executive to keep working on the tax reform. “We will support the Minister” of Finance, he said, calling on the Government not “to take measures at the margin.”
In the budget negotiations, the French-speaking liberals had called for linking tax reform and labour market reform. Piedboeuf confirmed this position on Wednesday evening, welcoming certain measures already taken such as the extension of flexi-jobs to new sectors and the increase to 600 of the maximum number of hours authorised for student work.
“Emergencies should not keep us away from structural reforms,” he stressed.
