Nearly 500 days after his federal elections, seven Belgian political parties nevertheless reached an agreement wednesday to form a majority coalition government led by Alexander De Croo, deputy prime minister and minister of finance and progressive cooperation in the current interim government.
De Croo, who will turn forty-five on November 3, will be the Flemish federal prime minister since 2011 and is expected to take the oath of office on Thursday.
Wednesday’s agreement came after weeks of negotiations to form a majority coalition to update Prime Minister Sophie Wilmes, who has led an interim government since 27 October last year after succeeding Charles Michel, who then took over as president of the European Council.
Wilmes, the first woman to hold office, only managed to form a majority coalition government when the COVID-19 pandemic struck Belgium in March, when she appointed the King of Belgium on 16 March to shape a permanent minority government.
The new majority coalition government, known as Vivaldi’s coalition, liberals, socialists and vegetables from flemish and French-speaking regions and Flemish Christian Democrats.
“This spirit of collaboration and the search for answers is what I felt in the negotiations,” De Croo said at a press conference on Wednesday.
“A rich and united country where everyone can find a better result. In the coming years, we want everyone to meet people’s expectations,”
The new prime minister is the son of Herman De Croo, a long-time Belgian politician who held ministerial positions and was president of the reduced space of the Federal Parliament for 8 years.
Before beginning his political career in 2009, De Croo became an Assignment Manager for the Boston Consulting Group in 1999. In 2006, he founded Darts-ip, a company specializing in serving senior asset professionals.
The new government appointed a COVID-19 commissioner to handle the fitness crisis. Belgium has one of the worst cases of deaths per capita in the world through COVID-19. The death toll from COVID-19 exceeded 10,000 on Wednesday and the total number of cases. it was more than 115,000 in a country of 11 million inhabitants.
In his tweets, Wilmes thanked his colleagues in the outgoing government and expressed his wishes for the next government led through De Croo.
The euractiv online news page reported that the conservative New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) party, which won the highest percentage of the vote in the May 2019 election with 16%, and the right-wing Vlaams Belang party, which won 12% of the vote. the vote in the most recent poll will not be registered for the new coalition government.
Euractiv notes that the two Flemish parties have already announced plans “to organize their resistance” to the new government. They pushed for a Confederal Belgium, calling for the country to be divided into two separate states capable of making its political decisions.