(This article was written by Derk Jan Eppink and appeared in Wynia’s Week. Met Bart De Wever regeert een ‘Verenigde Nederlander’ België)
With Bart De Wever (54) a different type of prime minister takes office than all his predecessors. Never before could a ‘Flemish nationalist’ take the oath before the Belgian king. A prime minister who looks critically at his own country, as if he were an outsider, was unthinkable.
For De Wever, however, Belgium is an ‘artificial construction’, a sort of slip of history. He himself dreams of a reunification of the Netherlands and is really a ‘United Netherlander’, avant la lettre. And prime minister of Belgium all the same. For the Dutch, a true mystery.
I first met Bart De Wever at the beginning of this century, after I had served for several years as political editor of the Flemish newspaper De Standaard, which back then still published under the logo: ‘Everything for Flanders, Flanders for Christ’. That was the world in which De Wever grew up as a young man. According to him the greatest tragedy of the Southern Netherlands was the fact that Spain definitively gained control of that territory, and above all of Antwerp, in 1648. The separation became a fait accompli and the Flemish grew poorer.
On 20 July 2021, a day before Belgium’s ‘National Holiday’, he said in Het Nieuwsblad: ‘I have never let go of the dream that all Dutch speakers would one day live together again in one union. If I could die as a Southern Netherlander, I would die happier than as a Belgian’.
For centuries the Flemish lived as serfs in political constructions dominated by Spaniards, Austrians, French, Dutch, Germans. Belgium became a buffer state with a French-speaking elite, and only thanks to the village priests did the Dutch language stay alive. The emancipation of the Flemish in Belgium is in fact a great success story. The Flemish hold all the cards, but they have kept a Calimero complex from their history.
A ‘Flemish nationalist’ as prime minister of Belgium is a tipping point. It indicates that not much more is left of ‘Belgium’ than a name on the world map and culinary traditions. It is de facto a divided country.
De Wever’s predecessors still worked within a ‘Belgian system’, of elites and networks in both parts of the country. I remember the late twentieth-century generation of Leo Tindemans, Wilfried Martens and Jean-Luc Dehaene, who as prime ministers dealt with French-speaking Belgium through the political elites there. That is over. Political elites too are separated, barely know one another and no longer speak each other’s language, exceptions aside.
Belgium is made most visible by the building of the public broadcasters VRT and RTBF in Brussels. A massive, ugly building. To the left of the entrance is Flanders; to the right French-speaking Belgium. On the left people speak Dutch; on the right French. The central corridor is the language border. That is political Belgium on a square metre.
It is not surprising that the king, whose task it is to hold Belgium together, is at peace with a ‘Flemish nationalist’ as prime minister. Twenty years ago De Wever would have been an uninvited guest at the Reception of the Constituted Bodies, the annual New Year drinks at the Palace for the leadership of Belgium’s institutions. The dream of a ‘Reunited Netherlands’ is now forgiven him.
Daydreaming is free. The acute problems of the Kingdom have to be tackled. The other Flemish nationalist party, Vlaams Belang, wants to do away with the king and his whole family. The moment the king hears the words ‘Le Vlaams Belang’, fear strikes his heart.
Why is De Wever the man of the moment? By the yardstick of nationalism he is moderate; for him it is more a matter of cultural awareness and identity. He speaks excellent French, a skill many Flemish nationalists have. They learn the language of their opponents and with it decode their way of thinking.
Conversely, few French-speaking politicians speak Dutch, which makes them somewhat deaf. Moreover De Wever speaks other languages well, even Basque, in the eyes of Flemish nationalists an ‘oppressed people’, by now successful. As a historian De Wever knows his classics and deals wholesale in Latin sayings.
In 2009 De Wever became famous throughout Flanders when he came within a hair of winning the quiz ‘The Smartest Person in the World’. He built his New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) from a one-man group in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives into the largest party in Flanders. On television, at 140 kilos, he made a somewhat comical impression, but he turned out to be very convivial and entertaining. That weight was just a size too much. Sixty kilos came off. When I saw ‘the new De Wever’ for the first time, I thought he was somebody else.
De Wever also offers the Netherlands a perspective as a ‘United Netherlander’. He knows the Netherlands better than many Dutch people themselves. The history above all.
As prime minister, De Wever is in charge of Belgian European policy. Unlike all his predecessors, De Wever is ‘euro-critical’. He holds that Europe and the European Union are not the same thing. In his book ‘Identiteit’ he argues that the EU wipes out European history from before its own founding as ‘bad’ and recreates itself as an ‘anti-nationalist entity’, but then itself creates an ‘EU nationalism’ with all the bells and whistles. Whoever does not cheer along is ‘anti-EU’.
Prime Minister De Wever cannot take on all the EU gods at once in Brussels, but there is a kinship between the somewhat more critical attitude of the Netherlands, certainly of the sitting coalition, and De Wever’s views. That did not exist before. Belgian prime ministers were heralds of the European Union.
The prime minister of the Netherlands and the ‘United Netherlandish’ prime minister of Belgium really ought to sit down together soon at the Catshuis, to talk about the Low Countries in this ever more turbulent Europe.
The first major problem for the De Wever I government is to bring the Belgian federal budget within the budgetary norms of the euro (a national debt of 60% of GDP and a budget deficit of 3%). Belgium currently sits at a national debt of 105% of GDP and a budget deficit of 4.6%. Belgium has to lose financial weight. Walloon socialists refused this coalition, because cutting spending is not their thing.
- Jan Jambon, 64 (N-VA): deputy prime minister and minister of finance. Jambon is mayor of Brasschaat, a municipality with many Dutch residents. From 2019 to 2024 he was Flemish minister-president. Jambon will become the central figure in Belgian euro policy. Friendly, a Burgundian.
- Frank Vandenbroucke, 69 (Vooruit); deputy prime minister and minister of public health and social affairs. Vandenbroucke has a long record of service. He was a member of parliament, minister of foreign affairs, afterwards of social affairs and subsequently of pensions. During covid he was minister of social affairs and public health. He pursued a strict policy with a curfew that began at 8 p.m. Vandenbroucke has something ascetic about him, almost Calvinist. Not suited to the bar. He has the reputation of a ‘know-it-all’, with the fair observation that he also knows a great many things.
- Vincent Van Peteghem, 44 (CD&V), deputy prime minister and minister of the budget. He sits in the government on behalf of the Christian democratic CD&V, the counterpart of the Dutch CDA. In the previous government he was already federal minister of finance. His political base is East Flanders; he is titular mayor of the municipality of Nazareth-De Pinte. Cutting the budget is his thankless assignment.
- Theo Francken, 46 (N-VA), minister of defence and foreign trade. Francken is a convinced Flemish nationalist who was earlier state secretary for asylum and migration. His political base is in Flemish Brabant (the municipality of Lubbeek), where he is the champion of preference votes. Cheerful, likes a pint, right wing of the party. Defence was his dream.
- George-Louis Bouchez (38) is party leader of the French-speaking liberal Mouvement Réformateur (MR), from the Walloon city of Mons (Bergen), where he is a municipal councillor. In 2019 he became chairman of the MR, in which he drew power to himself and pushed aside the established political family Michel. At the recent chairmanship elections Bouchez succeeded himself: no rival candidates. Bouchez is a capricious figure with a robust temperament (Italian mother) and with that, from the outside, an unpredictable factor for the coalition. He remains the MR’s parliamentary group leader in the federal parliament. He understands Dutch, but does not speak it well enough.
Derk Jan Eppink is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
