At the start of the year, it is always good to take a look ahead. What will 2025 bring us politically?
Federally, Arizona remains a tricky story, but no one sees a credible alternative. In Brussels, however, the situation is much more hopeless. There, negotiations have not even begun.
First it was months of waiting for a Dutch-speaking majority. When that finally arrived, including N-VA, the French-speaking majority was immediately shattered. The Brussels PS flatly refused to govern the Region with N-VA. Even more than a month later, the situation is still deadlocked.
Formateur Leisterh (MR) did try all sorts of maneuvers via Défi and Ecolo but seems to be close to despair. Going to the King is not an option in Brussels, he sighed, where he would undoubtedly have wanted to resign. Finally, he and Bouchez called on the national presidents to get involved, but that too fell on deaf ears.
Yet this initiative was not entirely without consequences. Because Sophie Rohonyi (Défi president) did not reject this initiative categorically enough, former president Olivier Maingain decided to close the door behind him in the week before Christmas.
He plans to re-found the party at the age of 66. Above all, it seems like a last convulsion of an icon of the old French-speaking FDF, the party that in the 1970s still wanted to expand Brussels with 15 Flemish peripheral municipalities.
Défi likes to keep dreaming of Brussels as an oasis francophone where Dutch is formally relegated to a second-class role. However, this is diametrically opposed to the evolution in which Dutch has actually gained in importance, especially over the last 10 years, and especially in education and on the job market.
Brussels unsustainable deficit
Today, Brussels has rather become an oasis in bankruptcy, thanks to the last coalition including Défi. The party was mercilessly punished in the elections and lost almost half of its seats. Maingain's departure marks a new loss, which finally brings a merger between the ailing Défi and Les Engagés one step closer.
Brussels residents have long since stopped dreaming of an oasis francophone, but rather dream of an oasis without Kalashnikovs that has its budget in order.
The complete stalemate in Brussels could be classified as some couleur locale of a region that has always been a complex maverick, were it not for the fact that this region is now virtually bankrupt.
Indeed, an inquiry into the latest figures by Benjamin Dalle (CD&V), whom the PS hopes can take the place of N-VA, revealed that the situation was much worse than previously thought. With an unchanged policy, the deficit would rise further from 1.3 billion to 2.46 billion, with a debt ratio of 265% of revenues. Unsustainable.
Nevertheless, Budget Minister Sven Gatz (Open VLD) simply continues in office, even though he had firmly claimed for an entire legislature that the budget would be balanced by 2024. Political responsibility unfortunately means absolutely nothing in Brussels and also explains how the Region was ever able to fall so deep.
Inevitably, therefore, in 2025 the “Brussels” dossier will also be on the federal table. When the banks refused to lend money to Liège, Charleroi and Mons, the Walloon government had to intervene with additional loans.
If the Brussels region receives a new downgrade in the spring and suffers the same fate, only a federal intervention can still bring relief. However, this would necessarily imply a new state reform because the money flows to the federal states are laid down in the “Special Finance Act”.
At the same time, voices are being raised here and there to revise the Brussels electoral system, supposedly because it is no longer adapted to Brussels' “multilingual” reality. However, this is mainly a false argument to tamper with the protection of the Dutch-speaking minority.
This is politically very explosive material that could turn Brussels into the BHV of this decade. BHV (Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde) dominated Belgian politics from 2007 until 2012, when a deal was finally reached to split the circumscription, because the Constitutional Court had declared it unconstitutional.
The Flemish parties now seem to have mentally abandoned Brussels. This is actually completely unjustified, because Brussels remains capital importance to the Flemish economy. Every day, 266,400 people commute from Flanders to Brussels, almost twice as many as Walloons.
Dutch and education
Moreover, paradoxically, the position of Dutch has never been as strong in recent years as it is today. More than 100,000 pupils and students attend classes in a Dutch-speaking institution. In kindergartens, this is now more than 1 in 4 (26.6%), in higher education even 1 in 3. Everywhere, the trend is upward, in contrast to French-speaking education, which is losing pupils every year.
Those who consider the Dutch speakers in Brussels as just one of many minorities, which is bon ton among cosmopolitan (and often Flemish) intellectuals, are therefore grossly mistaken. A strong political representation of Flanders in Brussels remains an absolute must and is also good for the residents of Brussels themselves.
The irony is that the only institutions that will soon not have to be cut back are precisely those of the Flemish community. On the contrary, a major rationalisation will inevitably have to take place in the impenetrable and wasteful tangle of Brussels agencies and non-profit organisations.
In addition, also the French community has been punching above its weight for years with an annual deficit of 1.3 billion euros. A balanced budget is foreseen by 2034. This austerity operation will also make itself felt in Brussels, both in education, in the many cultural institutions and at the RTBF. In comparison, the Flemish community spends 50% per capita less on VRT.
The saga surrounding the splitting of BHV dragged on endlessly from 2007 to 2012, even though the reform was actually a fairly simple operation all in all. However, it meant the end of French-speaking political power in Flanders, which explains why everything took so long. Compared to a reform of the Brussels Region, however, this was actually peanuts.
Since the first state reform in 1970, there has never been a structural “solution” for Brussels. A new power struggle over political control of Brussels is emerging. For some French speaking politicians, it remains unpalatable that they have to share power in Brussels with that pesky Dutch-speaking minority.
Through their own mismanagement, however, they have flawlessly illustrated that the Brussels' residents, of whatever language or origin, could actually benefit from more Flemish involvement and investments in education, infrastructure and safety. Given the complexity of the issue and Belgium's political tradition, talks on reforming Brussels might well drag on for years, if not longer.
