¿Qué dice el homenaje final de Charleroi a Jacques Van Gompel sobre su complicado legado?

Charleroi’s municipal councillors paid a final institutional tribute to former mayor Jacques Van Gompel at the city hall on Monday, 31 August, ten days after his death in Gilly at the age of 79. The gesture placed a distinctly Belgian tradition of local civic remembrance at the opening of the council’s first meeting after the summer recess, recognising a politician whose career was rooted overwhelmingly in the city and its neighbourhoods.

For residents, the significance lies less in national or European politics than in Charleroi’s relationship with its recent past. Van Gompel belonged to a generation of mayors whose authority rested on long service, party organisation and personal familiarity with local communities. The City of Charleroi says he spent 42 uninterrupted years in municipal public life, beginning as a councillor in the former municipality of Gilly in 1970 and remaining a Charleroi councillor until 2012.

An elementary-school teacher by training, Van Gompel also served as a federal deputy, alderman for Youth and Public Works and first alderman. According to the city’s official account, he became acting mayor in 1995 and mayor in title in January 2000, holding the office until 2006. Charleroi awarded him the title of honorary mayor in February 2022, after the Walloon authorities recognised the distinction.

His farewell unfolded in several stages. Charleroi opened condolence books at the city hall and the municipal building in Gilly, according to regional broadcaster Télésambre. Family members, acquaintances and political figures then attended his civil funeral and cremation in Gilly on 27 August. Those present included Socialist Party president Paul Magnette, current Charleroi mayor Thomas Dermine and Hainaut provincial governor Tommy Leclercq.

Their tributes emphasised proximity and public service. Dermine described Van Gompel as a guide for the kind of mayor who maintains an authentic connection with citizens, while Magnette remembered an approachable and generous man. Leclercq stressed his force of character and attachment to the Charleroi area, Télésambre reported. The municipal council’s subsequent homage carried that institutional framing across party lines: whatever the political disputes surrounding his career, the city was marking the death of one of its former leaders.

Yet the funeral also showed why remembrance cannot be reduced to an uncomplicated civic portrait. Rachel Van Gompel used her address to criticise former investigating judge France Baekeland and former Charleroi public prosecutor Christian De Valkeneer over the judicial action that led to her husband’s imprisonment in 2006, according to Télésambre. Her intervention put the family’s enduring sense of injury alongside the political establishment’s emphasis on warmth and service.

Van Gompel resigned as mayor after his arrest and spent 22 days in Jamioulx prison. The lengthy collection of investigations and trials associated with the so-called Charleroi affairs became inseparable from the end of his political career. The outcomes require precision: he was acquitted by the Mons Court of Appeal in 2013 in the separate synthetic-pitch case, while other proceedings had different outcomes. In 2021, the justice system granted him judicial rehabilitation, giving him a clean criminal record, Télésambre reported. Rehabilitation does not rewrite every judgment or settle every historical argument, but it formed an important part of how Van Gompel and his family understood the closing chapter of his case.

The broader lesson is about the unusually personal character of municipal power in Wallonia’s large cities. Charleroi’s elected officials were not only commemorating a former office-holder; they were acknowledging a political culture in which neighbourhood presence could sustain authority for decades, even as judicial scrutiny later transformed expectations of governance and accountability.

There is no material EU-institutional or international dimension to the event, despite Charleroi’s place in a European country. Its natural centre of gravity is Wallonia: a city deciding how to remember a popular former mayor without erasing the contested circumstances of his departure. No further formal memorial measure has been announced. The next question is whether Charleroi will give his name to a place or institution, or allow the council tribute and honorary title to stand as the city’s final official recognition.