Belgium’s security council met at 10AM this morning to come up with a response to the unidentified drones that disrupted flights at 5 Belgian airports over the past days (See inset article). Later the inner cabinet will meet to discuss the budget. Around 1PM premier Bart De Wever (Flemish nationalist) was expected to see King Filip. The PM is now not expected to tender his resignation despite the political impasse over the budget.
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"Budget agreement by Christmas or federal government's resignation"
Colin Clapson
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PM De Wever is eager to agree a multi-year budget with the coalition partners, but bilateral talks on Wednesday seem to have made little headway.
The Francophone liberals of MR continue to oppose a VAT hike and suspending index-related top-ups for wages and benefits as the premier is proposing.
VRT News understands that PM Bart De Wever (N-VA) will propose a deadline of Christmas to the inner cabinet to finalise a multi-year budget. If that budget is not in place by then, he will offer Filip, King of Belgians, the resignation of the federal government.
Christmas is actually a deadline that Francophone liberal leader Georges-Louis Bouchez has been pressing for for some time. Meanwhile, several coalition parties are wondering aloud whether Bouchez should not join the negotiations himself. In other words, the budget agreement would first be finalised in talks between party leaders and the prime minister.
That would imply, however, creating a kind of coalition agreement B. The question is whether everyone in the 5-way coalition will be willing to do so.
Role for the king?
“The king in his constitutional role can only do a limited number of things: advise, warn, and ask questions,” says VRT political editor Bart Verhulst. “I suppose there will now be a warning from the monarch; a message like ‘this must be sorted out’ and the imposition of a strict deadline.”
The prime minister's resignation no longer seems to be on the cards. “That has changed somewhat in the communication behind the scenes in recent weeks. The fact that there are now drones flying overhead may have something to do with it.”
“Moreover, you can't offer your resignation every time there is a problem. It's already quite unusual to see the king during budget negotiations. But even in a crisis scenario there are different phases. If you offer your resignation now, you're skipping a step. It's better to be sparing with that.”
Meanwhile a spokesman for the Francophone liberal MR has suggested that a temporary budget with a twelfth of this year’s budget being allocated every month during the start of 2026 wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
What will the security council decide?
According to Paul Van Tigchelt (opposition Flemish liberal Open VLD), a former Belgian justice minister and former director of the OCAD, the government body that analyses threats, the National Security Council must discuss three important issues.
The security services must provide politicians with an accurate picture of the situation so that they can make policy decisions on security.
Who takes on which task? This must be considered in terms of detection, identification, and neutralization of the threat posed by unidentified drones presumed to be operated by Russian agents, as well as in terms of communication with neighboring countries.
What stance should we take towards Russia? And how do we communicate with Russia?
“In times of crisis, it is important that everyone speaks the same language. We must provide an answer, but it is clear that this will not be easy,” concludes Van Tigchelt.