Peter Mertens: This Pandemic Shows How Elites Have Forgotten Us
With 18,000 dead out of a population smaller than Ohio's, Belgium has suffered the world's worst rate of coronavirus deaths. Belgian Workers' Party leader Peter Mertens told Jacobin how the population has been abandoned by the country's elites — and why things didn't have to be this way.
A medic pushes a cart at the entrance to the intensive care unit at the University Hospital of Charleroi on November 5, 2020 in Charleroi, Belgium. (Jean-Christophe Guillaume / Getty Images)
After years of patient organizing, the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB) has in recent times become a force to be reckoned with in national politics. Long building up its support in working-class communities, it made significant gains in the 2019 federal elections, at which it elected twelve of 150 MPs.
Belgium is not as uniformly wealthy as is often imagined — and it is also the country with the world’s worst COVID-19 death rate, with over eighteen thousand victims out of a population of just eleven million. The scale of this crisis shines through in the title of PTB president Peter Mertens’s recent book, Ils Nous Ont Oubliés (“They’ve Forgotten Us”).
Following its launch, Mertens spoke to Mario Cuenda Garcia and Tommaso Segantini about the PTB’s prospects. They discussed the Belgian and European responses to COVID-19, the dangers of the nationalist right, and the meaning of the PTB’s proposals for a “Red-Green Deal”
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