Can Charleroi’s ‘precarity fair’ turn social hardship into a political reckoning?

The Équipes Populaires have announced that they will stage a “precarity fair” in Charleroi, using the deliberately unsettling format to denounce what the Belgian adult-education movement calls the “trickle-down of misery”. La DH reported the initiative on 5 September, but the date, venue and complete programme could not be independently confirmed in the organisers’ public agenda at the time of publication.

For people in Charleroi, the campaign lands amid a tangible debate about housing, income and access to social protection. It also speaks to a wider Belgian argument: whether tighter benefits and stronger pressure to find work will improve employment outcomes, or transfer costs and hardship towards municipalities, families and public social-welfare centres, known as CPAS. The federal government has not publicly responded to this particular event.

The fair is part of a broader Équipes Populaires campaign built around the slogan “Précarité: à qui le tour?”—roughly, “Precarity: whose turn next?” The movement argues that policies presented as incentives for work can weaken households and then entire neighbourhoods when adequate jobs, housing or support are unavailable. Its campaign language reverses the familiar promise that wealth created at the top eventually benefits everyone: in its telling, insecurity is what spreads downwards.

That is an explicitly political interpretation, not a neutral description of every household’s experience. Yet Charleroi provides substantial evidence for treating the issue seriously. The Walloon Observatory on Homelessness counted 1,904 adults experiencing homelessness or housing exclusion across the Charleroi administrative district in October 2024. Its report recorded 1,361 of them in Charleroi municipality, while 344 affected adults had 611 minor children directly touched by their housing situation. Twenty per cent of the adults counted had no income, and 48.1% received the integration income administered through the CPAS.

The figures describe more than people sleeping outdoors. The Walloon count used a broad framework encompassing emergency accommodation, temporary stays with relatives or friends, unconventional housing and households threatened with eviction. That matters because precarity often remains hidden until a missed payment, family rupture or institutional discharge produces an emergency. The report identified family conflict, addiction, unsuitable housing, eviction and financial problems among the routes into housing instability.

National indicators give a more mixed picture. Statbel reported that 16.5% of Belgium’s population—just over 1.9 million people—was at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2025, down from the previous year. It also found sharp territorial and social differences: 21.9% of Walloon respondents described themselves as subjectively poor, compared with 9.4% in Flanders, while 39.3% of unemployed people nationally reported subjective poverty. Separately, 44.6% of Walloon respondents said they had difficulty making ends meet.

Those numbers sustain two competing readings. The Équipes Populaires see insecurity as a structural outcome requiring stronger collective protection, public services and redistribution. Federal Employment Minister David Clarinval and the De Wever government frame the two-year limit on unemployment benefits differently: as a policy to “responsibilise, activate” and accompany people towards work. The government has presented that reform as one of its central socio-economic measures, while opponents fear that people who lose federal benefits will turn to already stretched CPAS services.

The European connection is institutional rather than rhetorical. Belgium has endorsed the Lisbon Declaration’s goal of ending homelessness by 2030, including preventing avoidable evictions and ensuring that nobody leaves an institution without appropriate housing. The Walloon administration says European financial support helped fund the 2024 counts in Charleroi and Namur. The contrast is therefore measurable: commitments made at Belgian and EU level can be compared with conditions recorded locally.

The broader lesson is that poverty policy cannot be judged from a single headline indicator. Falling national poverty rates can coexist with concentrated hardship, particularly among tenants, unemployed people, single-parent households and those moving between unstable forms of accommodation. Charleroi’s fair is designed to make that concentration visible and politically uncomfortable.

What comes next depends first on the organisers publishing or confirming the practical arrangements and participating organisations. More consequentially, attention will turn to how the unemployment-benefit limit affects referrals to Charleroi’s CPAS, housing insecurity and demand for emergency services. Until local caseload and budget data emerge, claims about the reform’s precise impact remain projections rather than established outcomes.