Socialist party Vooruit calculated that Flemish families are greatly overpaying for necessities due to the government's failure to stop companies from overcharging customers. It has vowed to take a harsher stand to boost purchasing power.
In recent years, people living in Belgium have faced skyrocketing energy, grocery and petrol prices, and decreasing interest on their savings accounts, while many companies and banks have made mass profits.
A calculation by Vooruit shows that the "big players abuse power." This has resulted in Flemish households paying up to €1,200 extra per year for basic services such as energy, telephony and insurance, amounting to €3.4 billion across the region. It argued that nowhere in Europe do consumers pay more for phones, television and internet.
The newly appointed party chair Melissa Depraetere stressed that this is because there is too little competition between big players and the fact that they hardly have to abide by legal rules.
"They can just do as they please in terms of prices and thus make an extraordinary amount of money on the back of consumers," she said, adding that the market power allows them to continue to drive up their prices. "Yet it is the government's job to protect consumers."
'Lax protocols'
The Vooruit chair points the finger at Alexia Bertrand, the State Secretary for Budget and Consumer Affairs. She claimed that Bertrand is "always on the side of the lobby and big business" and that her weak protocols will not "break their power."
Depraetere pointed to the fact that when energy prices were sky-high, Bertrand laid down a protocol that the advance bill should automatically drop if prices did. "Energy suppliers briefly did so. But because it is not in the law, they are now washing their hands of it."
"You don't fight them with Bertrand's lax protocols that kindly ask the big players," Depraetere argued. "You do that with tough measures that support the consumer and break the power of the big players."
The party has therefore developed a plan as part of its election manifesto with some 25 proposals to legally oblige big corporations to bear consumer rights in mind, which ultimately should result in this large sum of money being returned to households.
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The proposals include guaranteeing savers a minimum interest rate, obliging banks, insurers, telecoms and energy companies to offer the cheapest contract and creating more competition by allowing additional players. This would, according to Vooruit, see bills automatically fall. Another proposal is ensuring that switching banks is easier and free of charge.
"By organising more competition and making consumer rights truly enforceable, we can boost the purchasing power of our families by €1,200 a year, without affecting our budget at all," said Depraetere.
Bertrand responded that she doesn't share Vooruit's vision and that the past has shown that government interventions in the free market are "counterproductive". She added that she will instead continue to inform consumers to make the right choice.
