Aidonian's blog

If a outsider would look at the political infrastructure, I think they wouldn’t understand it how it could work. Most Belgians don’t understand it either, i think.

Belgium is a great country, but we have a lot of issues and at its core, its the political class that actually makes things worse to sustain themselves.

Our political infrastructure is quite complex for a country with only 11 million citizens. Before a few decades ago, it was easier. Than you had municipal (city), province and federal. Somehow they thought it would make things easier if to create additional governments. Now next to municipal, province and federal, we also have the Flemish government, the Wallonian government, the Brussels government, We have 5 different type of governments and parliaments, with on top the federal one. In 2011 Belgium held the record of longest without a federal government. We actually celebrated it. It worked, because we had other forms of government that were functional at the time.

Here is the thing. Our infrastructure works against us, especially in crisis situation like with covid19 pandemic. The regional governments want their say in the matters and they want to profile themselves as the ones doing something. Politicians are always looking for to “solve” a problem, but in reality they aren’t solving anything really.

If you look at it, we have five regional governments who have parties in their government on opposing side of the political spectrum. They don’t care about what the people want except when it comes down to election time. The rest of the time, they are happy to screw the ordinary people over. They are happy to screw each other as well if it means to score political points with it.

Take Bart De Wever of N-VA, who during election time constantly attacks his opponents and starts a smear campaign against them, but after the election is basically crying when his political opponents dont want to work with him. If you behave like that, don’t act surprised when your opponents do the same thing to you or ignore you all together.

Traditionally speaking, we don’t have national parties, but regional parties that belong in the same political spectrum like the conservatives of CD&V, CD&H, the liberals of OpenVLD, MR, the “socialists” Vooruit (formerly known as SPA & PS, the green parties Groen & Ecolo, than we have one national party PVDA-PTB and the centrum and far right N-VA & Vlaams Belang. The thing is, most parties have shifted towards the centrum right political spectrum. All thanks mostly to N-VA who has normalised it.

Our political infrastructure costs a lot of money. To give an example.

One parliamentary member gets around 6000 euros a month. For a whole year that is 72.000 euros plus benefits. They get a pension that is higher than an average worker gets and a departure premium for when they aren’t re-elected. That is a lot of money.

Now multiply that 6000 euros a month with 522 (actual members of all parliaments in Belgium) and you will get why this is a separate class altogether. One that is funded by the people.

Add that when they leave office, they can have a seat in a board of directors somewhere which means that there is a revolving door between politics and private business’ and that means high chance of corruption.

We have at least 6 different parliaments for each government. We have a senate as well. The thing is, we don’t need all of these institutions. They cost tax payers a lot of money and slow things down. I think all Belgians agree that we need to go back to the way it was: city, province and federal. But N-VA & Vlaams Belang don’t want that. They want to split the country into two different countries. There are some among Belgians who also want that, but that is a small minority.

Let’s be honest. Is it in our best interest of the people the split the country up? One direct result of this would be that our social security is up for grabs by the private sector.

The answer is no. Its not in the interest of the Belgian people to split up the country. It would make things even worse as they are now. Economically speaking, Wallonia is worse off than decades ago but our social security makes it possible that even those are worse off, are still helped through that system to make sure that they don’t fall in the black hole called poverty and even homelessness. Is the system perfect? No. Is the system free of abuses? no. More on that later.

Besides, we are already a small country, do we want to become smaller to split Belgium up?

The problem with Belgian politics, that they only serve themselves and their friends. These career politicians care only about the economy and business’, not people. How many politicians go from political career straight to the private sector? sometimes even when they are still in office.

Our politicians are corrupt, like most in the world. We need different kind of politicians ,a different kind of politics.