Can Maximus’s Pride greeting make up for Bart De Wever missing Antwerp’s parade?

Prime Minister Bart De Wever missed the Antwerp Pride Parade in his home city on Saturday, 8 August, because he was on holiday, while Maximus, the cat whose popular social-media account is run from the prime minister’s communications orbit, wished participants a happy Pride. Het Laatste Nieuws reported the absence and the feline greeting as Antwerp held the centrepiece of its five-day LGBTQIA+ festival under the theme “Fearless”.

The playful message gave De Wever a presence in the conversation without putting him in the parade. That distinction matters because he now occupies two separate political worlds. De Wever has led Belgium’s federal government since February 2025, but he remains Antwerp’s title-holding mayor while legally prevented from exercising the municipal office. Els van Doesburg, also of the New Flemish Alliance, or N-VA, serves as acting mayor. The City of Antwerp’s official register confirms that arrangement and places responsibility for local security, events and municipal representation with the acting city administration rather than the federal prime minister.

De Wever’s holiday was therefore not an operational obstacle to the parade. Crowd management, road closures and local public order fall to the city and Antwerp police, while the Flemish and federal authorities exercise different responsibilities over equal-opportunities policy, criminal law and anti-discrimination rules. The city had warned businesses to expect more than 150,000 visitors around the parade and provided logistical and communications support to Antwerp Pride. The organisation describes itself as a year-round movement as well as a five-day festival, supported by more than 350 volunteers.

Maximus is not merely a household pet that happened to appear online. De Standaard reported in May that the cat’s Instagram account had overtaken De Wever’s own account in follower numbers. Le Soir subsequently described the account as being managed by a member of the prime minister’s communications team. De Wever himself told Het Laatste Nieuws that Maximus functions as an “alter ego” through which he can retain a more ironic voice while speaking more cautiously as prime minister. The Pride greeting should consequently be read as political communication, even if its tone was deliberately light.

That produces two legitimate readings. For the prime minister’s supporters and parts of the N-VA, the message is a warm, accessible gesture from a politician who could not attend and whose party has joined Pride events despite its centre-right, Flemish-nationalist identity. It also fits the municipal posture of an N-VA-led city that decorates public buildings and streets in rainbow colours and presents Antwerp Pride as both an inclusion statement and a major urban event.

LGBTQIA+ organisers and progressive parties apply a more demanding test. Antwerp Pride chair Geert Van Praet said when unveiling the 2026 theme that remaining visible despite fear was a deliberate choice amid concern about far-right growth and greater social conservatism. Groen Antwerpen describes Pride as more than a celebration, while the socialist ABVV frames participation as solidarity and resistance. From that perspective, an affectionate online greeting is welcome but cannot substitute for decisions on safety, discrimination, healthcare and the protection of transgender and other LGBTQIA+ people.

A sharper counter-frame comes from Vlaams Belang. Its Antwerp branch called for stronger security before the event following a deadly attack on a Pride gathering in Berlin, focusing principally on the threat of Islamist violence. Yet the party has also opposed institutional Pride visibility and presents contemporary Pride activism as ideological. That position differs from both N-VA politicians who participate in the parade and progressive organisations that identify far-right rhetoric itself as part of the hostile environment facing queer people. The disagreement is not simply over whether people should be safe; it concerns which threats are acknowledged and whether Pride is understood as a civic celebration, a rights movement or an unwanted political project.

The institutional background is equally important. Antwerp Pride reached its nineteenth edition in 2026 after developing from a comparatively small gathering into one of Belgium’s largest recurring public events. Its own history connects celebration with protest, tracing the modern Pride tradition to the 1969 Stonewall uprising. The City of Antwerp now treats the festival simultaneously as an equal-opportunities partnership, a public-order operation and an economic draw for the city centre.

This also falls early in the political cycle created by Belgium’s 2024 elections. De Wever became the first Flemish nationalist to serve as Belgian prime minister in February 2025 and heads the federal coalition of N-VA, Vooruit, CD&V, MR and Les Engagés. Antwerp’s N-VA–Vooruit municipal coalition began its six-year term in January 2025. Pride therefore brings coalition differences, party identities and the division between federal and local office into the same public space.

For parade-goers, the central story remained the festival itself: visibility, community and the freedom to occupy the city together. De Wever’s absence did not change who governed the event or whether it proceeded. The more durable political question is whether the friendly symbolism represented by Maximus is matched by consistent policy between Pride weekends. That will be judged through municipal security decisions, support for equality initiatives and the federal government’s record on discrimination and LGBTQIA+ rights—not through the holiday diary of one politician or the reach of one unusually successful cat.