Resigning Mayor of Brussels, Yvan Mayeur, hosting Sadiq Khan at City Hall in the Grand-Place in Brussels in March, 2017. Stefan Rousseau/Press Association. All rights reserved.In recent weeks, Brussels – and Belgian – politics have been shaken by a corruption scandal. In early June, it emerged that the Brussels mayor, Yvan Mayeur, had set up a financial reward system for himself and a close political ally to run for years, through which each of them collected around 112,000 euros for meetings that never took place. The most striking part was that this reward structure was set up within ‘ Samu social’, an agency that takes care of the homeless. In other words: this financial reward system was based on funds destined for the homeless. This was not the first time an event of this kind has occurred: the French-speaking socialist party (PS), all-powerful for decades in French-speaking Belgium and Brussels, allowed a series of such structures to be set up, resulting in a similar range of scandals.
Belgium has always had a complicated political structure – six parliaments and governments – in order to balance the power of the various regional and linguistic communities (Dutch- and French-speaking, and a small German-speaking community). Brussels is at the heart of these complexities: it is the only place in Belgium where French- and Dutch-speaking communities live together, governed by a maze of various political institutions. It is ruled by a parliament and government, 19 autonomous borough assemblies, six different police zones and 33 public housing companies. Quite a number of these institutions – such as the 19 borough assemblies within the Brussels capital – are primarily the result of a struggle for power and influence between political actors. Together, the Brussels region has 166 ministers, mayors and city councillors, which is more than Berlin (71) and Paris (42) combined.
The underlying raison d’être for this situation is the Belgium ‘pacification’ model, which thrives on consensus between the various cultural and political communities in Belgium. So, why were the above corruption scandals able to happen in this model?
