I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly Brussels Notes newsletter about the experience of living in the Belgian capital (if you’re not already a part of the community, you can subscribe here). This week’s article is all about how Brussels is run, who gets to have a say in its running, and why we need to have a serious debate about the city’s future.
Do you know the story of the monkey’s paw, the parable about the mysterious totem that grants wishes to its owner, but at an enormous cost. I’ve been thinking about the monkey’s paw a lot this week. I had a wish once, for Brussels to get more attention from Belgium’s politicians, leaders who understood what it meant to run a large, complicated, international city, that appreciated its charms and its obvious potential, and were wise to its difficult but not insurmountable challenges. Now my wish has been granted and Brussels has rocketed up the country’s political agenda, I’m not so sure it was a good idea. Because when I said I wanted people outside of Brussels to take the city more seriously, I didn’t mean to the detriment of the people living there.
Be careful what you wish for
Imagine a northern European capital, not large but with global ambitions, home to a diverse population and a complex politico-administrative structure, a city-region on a downswing but which has in the three decades since its creation established an identity distinct from the regions surrounding it. Now imagine winning an election to run this city only to turn around and tell its residents that because the previous lot they elected did such a poor job running the place, outside assistance is needed to manage its affairs. Imagine Anne Hidalgo announcing at the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville that she’s outsourcing the running of Paris to Fontainebleau, or Sadiq Khan enlisting the Milton Keynes city council to resolve London’s crime problems. I can’t. It’s literally unfathomable.
And yet, as the consequences of June’s regional elections continue to percolate through the city’s body politic, people in the city have been debating who has the right to run Brussels. It should be self-evident that Brussels should be run by the people who live there and vote in its elections, and that it should serve their needs (leaving aside the fact that fully one third of the city’s residents are foreign-born and therefore ineligible to vote). But some people would disagree. They would say that this is selfish, greedy even. Isn’t Brussels the capital of Belgium, doesn’t it belong to all Belgians, and therefore shouldn’t all Belgians have a right to interfere in how it’s run? What’s more, every day 350,000 people commute to the city to work. They may not live here, but might argue that they are as affected as any one of its residents - even more so, they might wail from their gridlocked car - by the decisions of voters and the people they vote in to run the place.
Never mind that Brussels doesn’t see a euro of the tax these commuters pay, which is funnelled into the bank accounts of the municipalities outside Brussels where they live. Brussels has to remain accessible to everyone, the logic goes, and if politicians there are impeding this, then outside intervention is warranted. Others will argue that, in any case, the city’s politicians have shown themselves manifestly insufficient to the task of running Brussels. The city is currently experiencing overlapping homelessness, drug, and crime crises. The streets are dirty, radicalism remains an issue, and there are intractable debates about how to wean parts of the city off their addiction to cars. Some of these problems are of its own making, some are a result of overlapping and unclear government structures, and others are just a consequence of Brussels’ outsized gravitational pull as a global city in a small country.
Less easy to dismiss though is that in running the city into the ground, they have also run out of money; totalling €13bn in 2023, the Brussels region’s deficit is projected to expand to €19bn by the end of the decade. Given all the above, maybe the people advocating for Brussels to enter into some kind of Britney Spears-style conservatorship are right. Maybe we’ve spent the last three decades electing the wrong people, and should hand back democratic privileges until we can show some fiscal rectitude.
To the people making these arguments, though, Brussels isn’t treated as a flesh and blood city that’s home to 1.2 million people who might identify with the city rather than with whichever language community they might notionally come from, but as a rhetorical device. It’s not a city dealing with the quotidian problems of any big city, but Belgium’s sin eater - a cautionary tale of the excesses of the modern world and the dangers of creeping urbanism. If you don't eat your vegetables Rudi Vervoort will ship drug dealers to your street. Go to sleep, or Elke van den Brandt will come and take your car away from you.
You can see this attitude in how many people would see Brussels as unworthy of equal treatment with Belgium’s other two regions. Look at the post-election discussions about the formation of a new national government, about how important it is to establish an afspiegelingsregering - a “mirror” government wherein the same parties are in charge at the national level and in the Wallonian and Flemish regions - and the absence of Brussels in these considerations.
Andorra-sur-senne
Let’s say these arguments are right, and because of prolonged mismanagement it no longer deserves equal treatment and administrative autonomy from the rest of the country. How would that work? Would Brussels - temporarily - become an Andorra-sur-Senne, run by the respective heads of Belgium’s other two regions but de facto left to its own devices. That’s probably not interventionist enough. It could become more like a protectorate, a Panama-aan-de-Zenne, with outside influence over the city’s affairs functioning in a sort of informal-formal way. Either way, these outsiders could hardly do a worse job, could they? A cursory look at their own performance should reveal a glaring discrepancy between Brussels and those who would seek to disenfranchise its residents. Comparisons are hard, for obvious reasons - Brussels is Belgium’s only real global city, its largest and most cosmopolitan. Hard, but not impossible. So for the sake of argument, let’s take two polarising policy areas which have dominated media coverage of Brussels in recent years - its economic performance and its mobility policy - and compare them with, I don’t know, for argument’s sake a city like Mons, and the region of Wallonia.
With a large university presence and a large NATO presence nearby, Mons has some experience as an administrative capital (of the Hainaut province), and like Brussels has struggled with post-industrial reinvention. In Mons, the unemployment rate in 2022 was 13.5% and the employment rate 53.2%. In Brussels, the most recent stats for the start of 2024 have those numbers at 11.9% and 63.3%, respectively. GDP per capita in Brussels is the highest in Belgium, at €66,200, whereas for the whole of Hainaut province, of which Mons is the capital, it is barely more than a third of that at €24,600. A quarter of all shopfronts in Mons are empty, while in Brussels-Stad (the most recent data I could find) that number hovers around 11%. On mobility and public transport, despite its modest population, Mons has the fourth worst traffic in the Wallonian region - worse than some of the region's larger cities like Liege and Charleroi. In Brussels, roughly 80% of travellers are satisfied with the city’s MIVB public transport company, compared to 64% in Wallonia for the TEC (and 59.7% with De Lijn in Flanders).
These are not figures that suggest a new cohort of politicians, unfamiliar with and inexperienced in managing the complexities of a city the size and structure of Brussels, will do any better than what the city already has. But maybe when people say outsiders, they don’t mean other municipal or regional figures. Maybe what they have in mind is the Washington D.C. model, a city with an underpowered local government where all major decisions are taken by Congress, and whose residents are barred from voting in federal elections. Is this a situation that would work for Brussels? Would nationally-elected parliamentarians be willing to micromanage the affairs of a city for which they have little affinity to very little personal gain? We can already see how the parts of the city already run directly by Belgium’s national government fare. Not well. Chronic flooding in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, drawn-out efforts to renovate the museums in Parc Cinquantenaire, the decrepit state of the Chinese Pavilion and Japanese Tower in Laken - if this is what Brussels could expect from increased national oversight, it doesn’t bode well.
Greater Brussels
But the more I think about ideas for reorganising how Brussels is run, the more I think maybe we have it backward. Maybe, instead of the periphery taking control of the centre, we should give the centre an opportunity to intervene in the periphery. The city might officially stop at its border with Flanders, but in every other way - economically, logistically, culturally - it doesn’t.
Just take mobility, again, as an example. Whereas the prevailing discourse is one of Brussels’ politicians isolating its Flemish hinterland through the creation of low traffic neighbourhoods, new bike lanes, and a stricter low-emissions zone, maybe it’s the inverse. Maybe the problem is actually the small-town mayors who run the ring of settlements immediately on Brussels’ border who are not on board with Brussels’ necessary modal shift. Whether it’s objecting to new park and ride facilities, objecting to new metro extensions, objecting to new tram lines, and objecting to great rail capacity, they are serving to asphyxiate the capital literally and metaphorically by forcing their residents to commute into Brussels by car.
Maybe they could benefit from a bit of big city intervention, by the creation of a coherent Greater Brussels Metropolitan area stretching as far south as Halle, north to Vilvoorde, and encompassing the mixed language “facility” municipalities on the city's east and west. Imagine how powerful it could be if the resources of the whole region were for once yoked to the same objective: of making Brussels the economic motor of Belgium. I’m sure we could even come up with a catchy abbreviation for this new conurbation.
Of course I’m being facetious, but only because that’s as serious as ideas like these should be taken. No one is advocating expanding Brussels’ purview into its Flemish hinterland. Wars - rhetorical and otherwise - have been fought for less. We may have to get used to living with the overbearing influence of an out-of-town mother-in-law, but Brussels is not about to be disenfranchised. To do so would be as much a reflection of the paucity of imagination, confidence, and ambition of its political leadership today as it would be a damning indictment of the past 35 years of self-rule.
There is an important debate to be had about how Brussels - this brilliant, maddening city - is run, and who does the running, but it’s a debate that needs to be had by us, the people dealing with the day-to-day grind of living here. And if there is a debate to be had about how the city fits into the wider construct of a haphazardly federal Belgium, then let’s have it - in both directions. Because once you break open the black box of constitutional reform, you’d better be prepared for some unintended consequences.
Miscellaneous Notes
Sorry this week’s newsletter is coming a little late, my brain doesn’t do well with abrupt increases in temperature, and I’ve been saddled with a migraine most of the week.
I’ll open it out in a chat later in the week, but interested to hear reader ideas about how Brussels could be better managed.
As it turns out, there is a small chance we might have to vote again - so all of this is immaterial!