The Flemish Minister of Transport, Public Works and Brussels Periphery, Ben Weyts (N-VA), wants to reopen the community debate after the federal and regional elections in 2019, he announces Saturday in an interview granted to De Tijd. The Flemish Minister wants to move towards confederacy, a system in which most of the competencies are regional. “Roughly speaking, we have two choices. Either we stay with the current arrangement, by which one community dominates the other (…). The second option is confederacy. I hope the French-speaking will also realize that it is better for them. It is how they will get the policy they voted for,’’ he affirms in De Tijd. The setting-up of confederacy “depends, however, on two things: the elector’s mandate and the people seated at the table of negotiations.’’
Ben Weyts pleads for a state’s seventh reform. “Bringing back a few trophies, making the whole even more inefficient, is not a game that we want to play,’’ he underlines. “The sixth reform is nonsense. I have many stupid examples of discussions on competences.’’
Following the last 2014 elections, the N-VA was fully engaged in a government of economic stimulus and had temporarily left community questions pending. Several nationalist party figures already affirmed that the party would not necessarily run at the forthcoming elections with a community agenda. “We shall see after the elections’’ what needs to be done, had claimed President Bart De Wever last year.
The Brussels Times
