On December 15, Belgium shut down. The general strike that started before dawn and continued well into the night was no symbolic protest — it was meant to halt every bit of production in the country. The twenty-four hour “blocage total,” which topped off two months of protests and regional industrial action, was coordinated in response to the raft of austerity measures being enacted by Belgium’s new government.

All too familiar across the eurozone, the public spending cuts and wage suppression have come late to Belgium. While Greece, Spain, Britain, France, and others have each had their own iterations of austerity since the onset of the global recession, Belgian politics remained largely unchanged under a center-left coalition government — until this fall.

Prime Minister Charles Michel’s coalition government was sworn in on October 14, 2014, promising to balance the country’s budget by 2018 and dramatically cut the national debt. For the first time in twenty-five years, the governing coalition doesn’t include the francophone Socialist Party (PS). Taking their place as the largest party in the new coalition is the Flemish nationalist party (N-VA), which has a penchant for regional separatism and neoliberalism.