Here is all the same, like every Friday, the post in which we summarize what you could have missed or what you did not have time to read on our media (and which is nevertheless worth the detour).
1) Home visits less divisive than ten years ago
We know that reaching agreement between the five parties that make up the federal government is not easy. A particularly sensitive issue, supported by a particularly divisive minister (Anneleen Van Bossuyt, in charge of Asylum and Migration), nevertheless obtained the green light from the Council of Ministers last week: home visits. To put it simply, police officers and agents from the Immigration Office will be able to enter a home, between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m., where people residing illegally who present “a risk to public order or national security.
The first version of the draft law was sent down by the Council of State. Remodeled in a second version, the text continues to annoy certain associations and certain representatives of the legal world. For example, the president of the Human Rights League believes that this is a project “liberticide and attack on the inviolability of the home and private life”. According to Sibylle Gioe, “the objective is to establish the same state of terror as ICE in the United States“.
Despite these angry reactions, discontent is much less than ten years ago. At the time, Koen Geens, then Minister of Justice, had his project rejected in the face of the outcry caused by civil society. “The same measurement now seems normal”notes the sixty-year-old today in an interview with our colleague Frédéric Chardon. To explain this change of heart, the former Deputy Prime Minister cites the “acute and successive crises” of recent years which means that“we feel in a diffuse way a threat which hangs over our persons and which makes us much less sensitive to the interests of those who suffer much more than us”.
2) Dolimont, the future of Walloons and cucumbers
Home visits were the very serious subject of the week. For the rest, it was rather “cucumber season“, as they say in the north of the country. But this famous qualifier of “cucumber time”or “information slack period”, obviously only applies to Belgian political news because, as you will not have missed, at the international level, it is much more loaded…
At home, we can still cite the (much anticipated?) “speech on the state of Wallonia” in which Adrien Dolimont was to take stock of his government’s action in the south of the country and present the major projects to come. Is it by embarrassment of his team’s current results? In any case, the Minister-President preferred to project himself into the future, venturing for example to estimate what will be “the daily life of Walloons” next year.
“In the end, the exercise undertaken by Adrien Dolimont remains, once again, relatively conventional”concluded our journalist Stéphane Tassin. And to continue: “The majority displays its optimism, while recognizing the difficulties that will punctuate the path, while the opposition highlights what, according to it, has been passed over in silence”.
This point 2 is not exciting, we grant you that…
3) Bouchez in China or the blue among the reds
Since we are still in “cucumber season“, let’s escape, let’s talk about travel. But professional travel all the same. And travel which can surprise, since it concerns the movement of a blue among the reds. And when the blue in question is called Georges-Louis Bouchez and he is invited by a communist country – China -, this can make the situation downright explosive. The MR understands this well. Faced with the criticisms to come, the The party took care to mark out this move very precisely in a particularly detailed and strongly supporting press release.
“Sans ªtre naïfs”, “critical distance”, “territory which worries as much as it fascinates”, “desire for understanding and essential international relations”…: the elements of language have been carefully chosen in the hope of neutralizing criticism before it is expressed.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs himself saw nothing wrong with it since, according to him, this trip was not “do not offend Belgian diplomacy”. Maxime Prévot, who will also go to China later this month (what a success, I say…) however made a point of specifying that the Montois “does not represent the official word of the government”.
So, exercise 100% successful? Not quite. According to De Morgen, several parties in the government coalition are worried about what the thundering liberals can do in China. The Flemish media goes even further by writing that “with Bouchezthere is often something fishy going on.”. Taking for example the Francs Borains football club, whose GLB is president, De Morgen believes that “the political and personal interests of the president of the MR are strongly intertwined”. Several sources interviewed by the media suspect the Montois of having mainly wanted to take advantage of this trip to seek sponsors for his club.
So, will we soon see Temu, Alibaba or Air China featured on the Francs Borains jersey?
