BENELUX LETTER
Expensive trips to Dubai for the President of the Regional Parliament of Wallonia, who ended up having to give up his post. All-out missions too, and not at low cost, for the Clerk of the Assembly – also accused of harassment and suspended from duty. Renovation work for the house of Walloon parliamentarians which should cost 46 million euros, four times more than the initial estimate. Without forgetting 3 million euros for a tunnel which would prevent elected officials from crossing in the open air the two or three tens of meters which separate their parking lot from their office.
In Brussels, meanwhile, the revelation of a project that would have resulted in paying a lifetime pension to senior officials of the regional administration who have worked for at least ten years. And, to make this great unpacking a little more difficult, the disclosure that the Belgian political parties spent, in 2022, some 5 million euros to ensure their presence on Facebook and Instagram. A sum taken from the 75 million that the Belgian State generously grants to these parties and which provides three quarters of their income. This amount constitutes, with regard to the number of inhabitants, a European record and allows, for example, the Flemish nationalist formation N-VA to invest in real estate.
This party, committed to making Belgium disappear in favor of a Flanders-Wallonia “confederation”, receives 11 million euros from the Belgian state each year… On the other side of the linguistic “border”, the PS receives 8 .6 million euros. And, overall, party assets have quintupled in the space of twenty years.
“A consummate art of evasion”
Tom Van Grieken, leader of the far-right Vlaams Belang party, separatist and xenophobic, was able to spend more than 363,000 euros in 2022 alone to ensure his presence on social networks, even though the law on party financing, adopted in 1989, was intended to exclude extremist formations from its scope. The success of Vlaams Belang in Flanders quickly swept away this fine idea: like the others, it can carry out a kind of permanent electoral campaign and carry out propaganda thanks to public money.
The law states, in fact, that each formation having at least one deputy is entitled to an endowment: a lump sum (some 185,000 euros), increased by a variable and plump amount (3.17 euros per vote obtained) . If the party has at least one senator, it also receives 74,000 euros, in addition to 1.27 euros per vote gleaned. Enough to allow, for example, the Labor Party of Belgium (PTB, radical left), great destroyer of the capitalist system of which the Gafam are undoubtedly the supreme incarnation, to pay over a year 248,000 euros to Facebook and Instagram in order to show up on their network.
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