In Belgium, Labor and the Government Face a Showdown
Organized labor has been more effective at defending the welfare state in Belgium than in most European countries. After recent actions resisting austerity plans, a three-day strike this week seeks to finally defeat the right-wing government.
Governments cutting welfare across Europe have often faced major resistance but still managed to dismantle welfare. In Belgium, labor has been unusually successful in defending past gains, also by learning the lessons of setbacks elsewhere. (Zeno Druyts / Belga Mag / AFP via Getty Images)
Last month, the streets of Brussels were painted red, green, and blue. In a major protest on October 14, 140,000 workers heeded the call of Belgium’s three trade union confederations — socialist, Christian, and liberal — to demonstrate against the right-wing government’s cuts to wages, pensions, and public services. It was the country’s biggest demonstration in the twenty-first century.
This was also the twelfth mass mobilization since the government, dubbed “Arizona” for the colors of the coalition’s parties, came to power after the 2024 elections. It showed that the Belgian workers’ movement — despite structural economic shifts and decades of neoliberal attacks — has the power to mobilize masses of workers to defend social rights, living standards, and fair taxation. Since the start of 2025, Belgium’s militant unions have increasingly escalated their mobilizations, including a thirty-thousand-strong teachers’ strike in January, a hundred-thousand-strong central demonstration in Brussels in February, a general strike in March, multiple regional and sectoral actions ahead of the summer, and the central 140,000-strong demonstration in October.
This will now be followed by another historic escalation: from Monday to Wednesday of this week, the labor movement will extend its habitual one-day actions to a three-day strike as the political dynamic heads toward a showdown before Christmas. A transport strike on Monday will expand to a public services strike on Tuesday, culminating in a general strike on Wednesday with pickets across the whole country.
Until now, neither the government nor the unions have backed down — also because the stakes couldn’t be higher. Fundamentally, the government is attempting to restructure the still-strong Belgian social model that unions have won and defended over the past century. With the mobilizations this year, the unions have managed to paralyze parts of the government’s agenda, demonstrating that organized labor still has teeth.
But almost one year after the “Arizona” coalition took power, will this next escalation be enough to defeat the government?
European Approach
As another example of the wider rightward lurch in Europe, Belgium’s elections last year saw right-wing forces win majorities both north and south of its linguistic border. The biggest governing parties are the Flemish-nationalist N-VA and the not-anymore-so-liberal Walloon MR, propped up by centrist forces Open VLD and Les Engagés, as well the Flemish social democratic Vooruit. While shutting the ascendant far-right Vlaams Belang out of power, they formed coalitions at the regional and federal levels. Previously, even under federal right-wing governments, left-wing forces in the French-speaking south, in particular the center-left Socialists, had held a majority in the regional government.
Now, egged on by the EU-wide push for “competitiveness” and the European Commission’s deficit-reduction procedure to instill fiscal discipline, the Belgian government proposed sweeping neoliberal reforms to labor regulation, pensions, and unemployment insurance. While these measures target workers’ purchasing power, the coalition also discussed anti-protest laws and imposing transparency rules on unions’ strike funds. It’s all designed to weaken workers’ resistance — a playbook we know from Finland, France, and Italy.
The unions promptly denounced this as the biggest rollback of labor rights and the welfare state since militant trade unionism wrested major concessions from capital in the postwar social pact in 1946. Since then, the Belgian welfare state has remained one of Europe’s strongest, with social spending hovering around 30 percent of GDP. For example, until now, Belgium was the last European country to have time-unlimited unemployment insurance. Despite the government’s periodic attacks, it is one of only two countries maintaining inflation-indexed salaries and pensions, which better protected workers in Belgium during the cost-of-living crisis of recent years.
To justify this attack on workers’ living standards, Belgian prime minister Bart de Wever, a Flemish nationalist, conjured up the tired austerian rhetoric of “belt-tightening.” This rings hypocritical to many workers — not just because of his and his ministers’ high salaries. It’s because a decade ago many of the ruling coalition’s parties themselves deliberately cut the state’s tax and social-security revenue, creating the same “budget hole” they say they need to fix. In the meantime, financial support to businesses has reached record levels, having doubled in the last twenty years. The austerity program is not simply a fiscal, but a political decision: the same amount can somehow be “found” to purchase military equipment to reach Trump’s NATO spending target.
Government Weaknesses
Throughout this wave, the Belgian labor movement managed to maintain a united front across the three confederations, the private and public sectors, and the country’s linguistic communities. This powerful response put the government on the back foot, exposing contradictions between its different parties. Social democratic Vooruit is under pressure to defend the historic achievements of the movement it was born from. The right-wing MR has campaigned on a promise of higher purchasing power through lower income taxes but proposed nothing but falling living standards. The Christian Democrats, despite weakening their ties with the Christian labor movement, are still responsive to pressure on socioeconomic issues: a regional teachers’ strike forced them to make a U-turn in French-speaking Wallonia. And in the middle of it all, the premier tries to satisfy Flemish capital while keeping the “Arizona” coalition together.
Admittedly, the government managed to push through some regressive measures, such as the limitation of unemployment insurance to two years. This will see the 160,000 people who lose their benefits thrown into precarity. As the benefits are largely paid out to individuals through the unions — and thus are an important reason to become a member — this forms a double-sided attack on organized labor.
Still, the “Arizona” government has been unable to advance an inch on its controversial pension reform. This is also because, unlike on the question of unemployment insurance, workers across professional, regional, and political divides are united in rejecting its proposal to raise the pension age from sixty-five to sixty-seven. The plan includes a brutal sanction of up to 25 percent for those seeking early retirement.
This would particularly affect women and blue-collar workers in manufacturing, logistics, cleaning, care, and other sectors where taxing physical work results in a low life expectancy in good health — that is, the age up to which people can still enjoy their lives without major health issues. This average in Belgium is only 63.7 years — a number that hasn’t changed over the last fifteen years — and older data suggests that university-educated workers have ten years more in good health than others. This exposes as a lie the argument that we are living longer and so should work longer.
But it’s not just the pensions reform that workers in Belgium have successfully risen up against.
In the past, Belgian labor won a general ban on nighttime work between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. This measure gives labor enormous leverage when negotiating carve-outs with employers in twenty-four-hour sectors such as manufacturing, chemicals, care, and logistics. This regulation is now under attack: the “Arizona” government wants to cheapen labor by changing the definition of nighttime work.
For example, currently logistics workers earn a higher nighttime wage for the ten hours of work in this period — an important boost to their purchasing power and compensation for the detrimental health effects of working atypical hours. Under government proposals, a worker could lose half her nighttime bonus, as the definition is changed to between midnight and 5 a.m. only. It could mean losing several hundred euros per month.
Minister of Labor and the Economy, David Clarinval, has explicitly linked a €1 billion investment by US-based multinational Amazon — a plan that will create neither good nor many jobs — to this policy. As the Make Amazon Pay coalition has highlighted, Amazon is a union-busting wrecking ball undermining standards across the whole economy, including decent jobs in logistics. The government shows its true agenda here: replacing what’s left of European social democracy with rapacious US-style capitalism.
Showdown
However, because of the sustained pressure of repeated mobilizations over the past year, the government has been unable to put the measure to a vote in parliament and has been forced to agree to carve-outs for certain sectors.
Now, the political dynamic is heading toward a showdown: with the government incapable of agreeing on these and other measures, its budget negotiations have been paralyzed too. Prime Minister Bart de Wever — who wants to cut €10 billion in the welfare state — had to postpone the parliamentary budget debate multiple times. Most recently, he sought out the Belgian king, asking for a fifty-day extension for the budget negotiations and — should they fail — threatening his resignation just before Christmas.
This is the context in which workers will strike again this week. The outcome is entirely open — from the fall of the government to the implementation of its antisocial measures. In 2023, we saw how the union-led protest movement against the pension age hike in France was defeated by Emmanuel Macron’s authoritarian use of the so-called Article 49.3, decreeing a change in the law with no parliamentary vote. In 2024, we saw that the Finnish labor movement — despite an all-out political strike that paralyzed exports for weeks — wasn’t able to push back the right-wing government’s attack on the Nordic model. But we have also seen how, in France, a few days ago the pension reform was suspended and how, in Finland, the governing far-right Finns Party is now polling at just half its score from the last elections. None of this would have happened without the unions’ resistance.
So, what will happen in Belgium in 2025 — and what effect will it have on the political dynamic over the coming years?
The movement might perhaps win on some fronts and lose on others. What we know already is this: a year-long strike wave has built union connections with dozens of civil society organizations, trained hundreds of new union leaders, brought thousands of young people into the movement, allowed hundreds of thousands of workers to know what it means to strike, and educated millions about the ruling parties’ antisocial agenda.