Can Ben Weyts turn Flanders’ next budget into a credible multi-year plan?

Flemish Vice-Minister-President and Minister for Budget and Finance Ben Weyts

Organisation

Flemish government

Regional executive responsible for negotiating and implementing the Flemish budget.

Why it matters

Regional executive responsible for negotiating and implementing the Flemish budget.

About

The Flemish Government is the executive branch of the Flemish Community and the Flemish Region of Belgium. It consists of a government cabinet, headed by the Minister-President and accountable to the Flemish Parliament, and the public administration divided into 13 policy areas, each with an executive department and multiple agencies.

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The immediate deadline is the September Declaration

Organisation

Flemish Parliament

Regional legislature that debated the adjusted 2026 budget and scrutinises Flemish finances.

Why it matters

Regional legislature that debated the adjusted 2026 budget and scrutinises Flemish finances.

About

The Flemish Parliament constitutes the legislative power in Flanders for matters which fall within the competence of Flanders, both as a geographic region and as a cultural community of Belgium.

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His central argument is that balancing a single year would provide a misleading picture. The Flemish government has repeatedly committed itself to reaching balance in 2027 under its own adjusted definition, which excludes expenditure on the Oosterweel road project and parts of the Vlaamse Veerkracht recovery programme. During the parliamentary debate on the adjusted 2026 budget in July, Weyts said its purpose was to keep the government on course for balance when the 2027 budget is drawn up. A multi-year agreement would go further by testing whether that position can be maintained after the temporary advantages of 2027 disappear.

The numbers explain the change in emphasis. The Social and Economic Council of Flanders, or SERV, estimated in July that the adjusted 2027 deficit could narrow to €285 million, equal to 0.4% of revenue, after applying the government’s budget objectives. A one-off €428 million settlement under Belgium’s Special Finance Act contributes substantially to that improvement. The settlement reflects higher inflation, which affects the federal transfers and tax receipts flowing to Flanders.

The same SERV analysis offers a much less comfortable view of the years that follow. It projects the financing balance deteriorating again from 2028 and reaching a deficit of €2.57 billion in 2030 under its broader calculation. Flemish debt has tripled since 2019, the council said, and could rise to about 107% of annual revenue by 2030. Those projections are estimates rather than an adopted budget, but they show why a nominally balanced 2027 would not by itself resolve the structural problem.

Voka, the Flemish employers’ network, has consequently argued for precisely the kind of multi-year approach Weyts is now advocating. It estimates that the deficit excluding Oosterweel could again reach roughly €1.7 billion in 2030 and says consolidation should protect expenditure on innovation, skills and productive infrastructure. Its frame is not simply that Flanders must spend less: it is that recurring commitments should be matched by recurring revenue while investment capable of strengthening growth is preserved.

That principle becomes harder when translated into coalition choices. N-VA presents budgetary balance as a safeguard for Flemish autonomy and future policy capacity. Vooruit entered the Diependaele coalition to secure additional commitments in childcare, welfare and school meals, while CD&V has responsibilities and priorities in areas including welfare and rural communities. A settlement extending through 2029 would therefore determine not only the size of the adjustment but which promises remain protected and whether any measures are phased in over several years.

The parliamentary opposition disputes the government’s account of its progress. In July, Groen parliamentary group leader Mieke Schauvliege argued that the adjusted budget relied too heavily on debt and choices that would burden a later generation. Independent MP Maurits Vande Reyde focused on the large current deficit and challenged Weyts’s optimistic language about being on course. Their objections represent two distinct frames: Groen stresses the social and intergenerational consequences of consolidation and debt, while Vande Reyde argues that the government has not controlled expenditure firmly enough.

The institutional boundary matters. This is a Flemish regional and community budget, covering competences such as education, welfare, mobility, housing, economic policy and parts of taxation. It is separate from the federal budget managed by Prime Minister Bart De Wever’s government. Yet the two levels are financially connected through the Special Finance Act, federal tax decisions and transfers. Measures taken federally can change Flemish receipts or costs even when the Flemish Parliament has no direct control over them. European fiscal surveillance primarily assesses Belgium’s combined public finances, which means federal, regional, community and local results ultimately feed into the same national picture.

Flanders traditionally starts from a stronger fiscal position than the federal state, but successive shocks have weakened that advantage. Pandemic support, the energy crisis, recovery spending, higher interest costs and large infrastructure commitments expanded deficits and debt after 2019. The present dispute is therefore less about whether annual budgets already contain multi-year estimates—they do—than about whether the coalition will make binding political choices across several years instead of postponing each difficult trade-off to the next annual negotiation.

For residents, the practical consequences could eventually be felt in subsidies, public-service staffing, mobility budgets, school and care funding, or regional taxes. It would be premature to identify winners and losers because Weyts has not published a negotiated list of measures. The first test is whether Diependaele, Weyts and the leaders of N-VA, Vooruit and CD&V agree that the September conclave should settle the full path through 2029. The second is whether the resulting figures survive scrutiny by the Flemish Parliament, the Court of Audit and the SERV. Until the coalition releases tables showing recurring measures for every year, a multi-year budget remains an objective rather than an outcome.