In the elections in 2024, the N-VA should actually achieve 25 percent, only then can the party be the motor of a state reform that offers Flanders more autonomy. That said chairman Bart De Wever on Radio 1.
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21.2 percent. The N-VA achieves this in a recent poll of, among others, The last news on The evening. And that is a lot less than the 25 percent in the elections of 2019. In the poll, Vlaams Belang is the largest party with 23.6 percent.
21 percent is not enough, N-VA chairman Bart De Wever realizes. If we want to be the engine of a much-needed reform of our country by 2024, we need a quarter of the votes, he says.
It is an attempt to bring the electorate that doubts between Vlaams Belang and N-VA to its party. According to him, Vlaams Belang is a party with ‘political hooliganism as a house style’. They want to declare independence unilaterally and that ‘Catalan scenario’ will plunge our country (and Flanders) into chaos, according to De Wever. Those who vote for Vlaams Belang are actually putting their vote in the fridge, he says.
The N-VA party chairman sees how every election round in our country ends in an endlessly long government formation in which the traditional parties eventually cling to each other, often without even a majority in Flanders. And where, as now, the seventh party in the result may supply the prime minister.
De Wever therefore hopes that such a scenario will simply become impossible in 2024.
According to him, people in French-speaking Belgium are now also realizing that a thorough reform is inevitable.
And what if it doesn’t work out in 2024? ‘It is not the intention that we miss the appointment, of course,’ said De Wever this morning on Radio 1. ‘But in the end the historic mission will succeed, I just don’t know when. But it is best done in 2024 because otherwise it will have to happen in much worse circumstances.’ De Wever pointed out that, for example due to the low interest on savings, the Fleming is impoverished.
Optimistic De Wever
Later in the day, De Wever addressed his party members at a meeting in Brussels on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of his party. The guest list included a number of foreign speakers, such as former Bavarian culture and education minister Monika Hohlmeier (CSU) and former Member of Parliament Han ten Broeke (VVD).
In his closing remarks, chairman De Wever looked back on the past 20 years, in which N-VA grew from a mini-party to the leading formation in Flanders, which has supplied the prime minister since 2014. However, there is a big but, according to De Wever. “During our 20 years of life as a party, we saw the federal level go from bad to worse. There is nothing left of what once was Belgian democracy.’
The lowest point was reached for De Wever when the Vivaldi government was formed. And as his party has repeatedly stated, De Wever does not believe that the federal government will implement necessary structural reforms, with detrimental consequences for the north of the country. ‘Every day that Belgium lies like a rudderless ship before Pampus, the money of the Flemish saver melts further into the ever deeper pit.’
But De Wever is nevertheless optimistic. ‘The time is now. The impoverishment of Flanders due to the federal standstill will become so tangible that no one will be able to deny the sunlight. The democratic contradiction between Flanders and Wallonia will become so great that no one will be able to give credibility to the federal government’, believes the chairman. And that is why only confederalism can offer a solution, with the N-VA as the only party that can provide it, according to De Wever.
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