Can Bruges remove Vlaams Belang councillor Marie Laeremans over her registered address?

The Bruges

Place

Bruges

Flemish city conducting the population-register and municipal-mandate procedures.

Why it matters

Flemish city conducting the population-register and municipal-mandate procedures.

About

Bruges is a commune in the French department of Gironde, region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, southwestern France. It is located north of Bordeaux.

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According to De fauw, the city acted after police carried out seven checks at Laeremans’s registered address over an extended period and did not find her there. He told Het Nieuwsblad that there had also been reports that she was living in Sint-Martens-Latem, in East Flanders. Those are the city administration’s grounds for the deregistration; they do not, by themselves, establish in public reporting where Laeremans actually has her main residence.

Laeremans rejects the city’s account. She told Het Nieuwsblad that she had not moved and still lived above the hospitality business she operates in central Bruges. She said she would contest the decision, but offered no further public detail about the evidence she intends to submit. Her position therefore remains that the administrative conclusion is wrong, not that an exception should be made for her political mandate.

That distinction matters because this is not an ordinary political dismissal. A governing majority cannot simply expel an opposition councillor because relations have deteriorated or because it dislikes her party. The issue is whether Laeremans continues to meet a statutory eligibility condition applying equally to every councillor in Flanders: uninterrupted registration in the population register of the municipality where the person serves.

The Flemish government

Organisation

Flemish government

Regional authority publishing official guidance on the mandate of municipal councillors.

Why it matters

Regional authority publishing official guidance on the mandate of municipal councillors.

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 formal responsibility now lies with Bruges Municipal Council and its chair, Annick Lambrecht of Vooruit. De fauw said the file should in principle reach the council in September. Bruges lists its September meeting for Monday, 28 September, although publication of the agenda will determine whether the case is considered then. The vote on forfeiture must be secret under the Flemish decree, an institutional safeguard intended to separate an individual mandate decision from an ordinary public party-line vote.

The procedure also has an external check. The chair must notify both Laeremans and the Flemish Council for Electoral Disputes of facts that may justify forfeiture. If the municipal council does not act within two months of formally learning those facts, the electoral tribunal can intervene on its own initiative or at the request of another councillor or the public prosecutor. The same tribunal is competent to adjudicate disputes over a forfeiture decision.

This places two named frames in opposition. The CD&V–Vooruit city administration, articulated publicly by Mayor De fauw, treats the population-register decision as a legal eligibility problem that obliges the institutions to act. Laeremans, a councillor for the opposition Vlaams Belang group, treats the underlying residency assessment as factually mistaken and intends to use the available review procedures. Whether the police checks justify deregistration, and whether any challenge suspends or reverses that measure, cannot be settled from the information currently public.

The political context is nevertheless relevant. Laeremans entered the council during the municipal term that began after the October 2024 elections. VRT NWS reported at the council’s installation in December 2024 that she was one of two new Vlaams Belang faces. The City of Bruges still lists her among the party’s five councillors. The current administration is led by De fauw under a coalition agreement between CD&V Lijst Burgemeester and Vooruit for the 2024–2030 term; Vlaams Belang sits in opposition.

A loss of mandate would therefore change the personnel of the opposition, though not necessarily its allocation of seats. Flemish rules provide for a councillor whose mandate ends to be replaced by the appropriate successor from the same electoral list, subject to verification of that successor’s credentials and a public oath. Because municipal and public social-welfare council mandates are linked in Flanders, forfeiture would normally affect both roles.

The case also illustrates why residence is more than a mailing formality in Belgian local democracy. Municipal councillors exercise regulatory and scrutiny powers over a defined community, so Flemish electoral law connects eligibility to formal residence in that community. Population registration supplies an administratively verifiable rule, but contested cases can turn on the difference between being absent during checks and having genuinely transferred one’s principal residence. That factual question is precisely what the hearing and appeal mechanisms are designed to test.

The next decisive steps are notification, Laeremans’s opportunity to be heard and any challenge she brings against her removal from the register. If the matter reaches the September council, members will have to decide whether the statutory condition has been lost on the evidence before them. Until then, describing Laeremans as already dismissed would go too far: Bruges has initiated the process, while both her residence and the future of her mandate remain contested.