“I didn’t vote for five or six party chiefs to run the country between them.”
I had not heard of Luc Bertrand before my weekly dip into the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. But he made me think this weekend when I looked at the Saturday edition’s in-depth interviews, a window onto what my neighbours in and around Brussels are thinking as well as life beyond the world of English-speaking media.
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Bertrand, 73, seems to have it all. He stands atop a Belgian family conglomerate (Ackermans & van Haren) with roots in shipping, banking and the late 19th century, when Belgium was one of the most technologically advanced and richest countries in Europe. But he is full of gloom about bad governance and the bottomless fiscal swamp that Belgium and Europe now find themselves in.
De Morgen’s headline trumpets him saying that “European industry is being swept off the map.” Bertrand lists the elements of his argument with clarity: a fragmented and over-regulated continent unable to foster innovative companies, especially in technology; a Europe that gives advantages to fatal Chinese competition, but can’t get the same rights to grow in China; a Europe that equalled the US a generation ago, but now only produces 70% of what Americans manage; and in Belgium, out-of-control budgetary deficits, under-investment and over-consumption, leading to the plight of young couples who pay 60% tax and can’t afford to buy a house to live in.
“Europe has allowed itself to fall asleep,” Bertrand said. “We have the best engineers in the world, but none of the best seven high tech companies are European.”
A dead end
What struck me most were this captain of European industry’s concerns about the dead end of politics in both his country and also Europe more broadly. Right now, Belgium is off the end of the scale of political dysfunction, still unable to form a new federal government after elections in June that (once again) left several parties squabbling over how they might cooperate to form a cabinet. Neighbouring France, Germany and the Netherlands are doing little better, and the UK is barely out of the post-Brexit woods.
Bertrand points out that it’s not just the way so much time is lost first campaigning for votes and then forming governments (in Belgium this has already taken more than a year twice in the past 15 years). The quality of government dialogue with business has suffered too. Fifteen years ago, Bertrand said, a minister might gather a half-dozen relevant industrialists, invite them in and listen to the conversation. Now, he says, industrial bosses get invited to events by the score and then only get lectured at.
“Today … we live in a vacuum,” Bertrand said. “Politics itself is less powerful. We only hear about obstacles and compromises, from morning to night. We hold elections, and six weeks later we still don’t know who won. Then all the parties behave as if they are the ones who are victorious. I ask myself a lot of questions over democracy in this land. I didn’t vote for five or six party chiefs to run the country between them. This is not just a problem in Belgium. In one [European] country they are tending towards authoritarianism, another is just a democracy in name.”
The paradox
When describing the policymaking that he wants, Bertrand gives the example of his conglomerate. He says family interests mean that investments come first and they can take long-term decisions, avoid deficits and smooth the peaks and troughs between good and bad times. He would also like a “moderate Elon Musk” to cut out Belgium’s unfunded government spending.
But here’s the paradox: for him the way to get there is to go backward to cosy two-party electoral politics. The family seems invested in this old route. His daughter Alexia Bertrand is Budget Minister in the outgoing government and a high-ranking member of one of the centre-right parties in talks to form a new government.
It’s ironic that someone so observant and keen on innovation can find no better response to the current failure in governance than a repeat of the party-based electoral formula. That is what got us into this mess in the first place.
After all, Belgium has seen some of the exciting experiments in deliberative democracy. Brussels is home to the best-selling author of Against Elections, the pioneering David van Reybrouck. Concerned Belgians convened one of the earliest citizens’ assemblies, chosen by lot during a government breakdown already 15 years ago. Five years ago, eastern Belgium’s German-speaking community set up the world’s first permanent citizens’ assembly. There are several other examples of new ideas to use randomly selected groups of citizens to make policymaking work more efficiently – and take the long-term view that Bertrand and many others want to see.
In late December, Belgium passed its latest 200-days-without-a-government mark. To judge by Luc Bertrand’s comments about where his conglomerate’s investment is going – places far from Europe that are actually growing – we haven’t hit the bottom of the cycle yet.
Still, Belgium’s past success, the individualism of its people, the diversity of Brussels and a relative lack of inequality do still give me grounds for hope in the country. And perhaps Belgium is so original and good at evolving new tools of deliberative democracy precisely because the country is well ahead of others in Europe in the cycle of stagnation of a once-rich industrial state.