Belgium has a prime minister who has tried to resign and a king who has not yet said yes. Bart De Wever drove to the Royal Palace in Brussels on Monday morning, hours after his inner cabinet broke up without a deal on next year’s budget, and put his government’s fate in King Philippe’s hands by tendering its resignation. After roughly ninety minutes together, the palace announced that the monarch was taking the offer “under consideration”.
Philippe will now sound out the leaders of all five governing parties, starting on Tuesday, and has asked De Wever to return on Friday, 6 November. Until then the Flemish nationalist remains in charge. In an unusually pointed statement the palace said the country could not afford a drawn-out crisis at a time of geopolitical and economic strain, and urged everyone to put compromise ahead of party interest.
Nicknamed “Arizona”, the five-party alliance spans the Flemish nationalists of N-VA, the francophone liberals, two centrist parties and the Flemish socialists, and it has to squeeze roughly €10 billion out of the 2027 accounts. Belgium’s deficit was about 5% of GDP last year, well above the EU ceiling of 3%, and the state owes upwards of €735 billion, a debt load larger than 110% of GDP.
The quarrel is about who pays. The socialists and the two centrist parties want wealthier households to contribute more; Les Engagés floated a 15% capital gains tax. N-VA and MR would rather cut spending. For the liberals, deputy premier David Clarinval grumbled that the plan still contained an excessive tax burden.
De Wever has been here before. Last November, with talks equally stuck, he asked the king for more time and was granted 50 days. This time he went further. Should Philippe say yes, ministers would stay on only in a caretaker role, with a vote due inside 40 days. The alternative is a stopgap De Wever has publicly rejected: so-called provisional twelfths, under which spending is frozen at 2026 levels and released one month at a time. It took 234 days of talks to form this coalition in the first place.
