België heeft in 2025 meer stakingsacties geregistreerd dan in enig voorgaande jaar

Belgium recorded more strike action in 2025 than in any previous year, according to figures released on 2 September by the European Trade Union Institute using Belgian social-security data. Workers registered 1,354,845 strike days, while 820,917 employees participated—both record totals. The intensity reached 313 days per 1,000 employees, exceeding the previous peak of 299 in 1993.

For people living and working in Belgium, the figures explain why disruption became a recurring feature of 2025 rather than a sequence of isolated disputes. Rail passengers, airport users, families with children in school, public-service users and businesses repeatedly had to adjust their plans. RTBF reported that the interprofessional strike on 31 March alone slowed much of the country, severely disrupting trains, buses and flights while affecting public services and private industrial zones.

The main political driver was organised resistance to the federal coalition led by Prime Minister Bart De Wever. The CSC, FGTB and CGSLB opposed reforms affecting pensions, unemployment protection, working time and public-sector employment. Their argument was that the programme shifted an excessive share of budget consolidation onto workers and people with interrupted careers. The government maintained that Belgium’s ageing population, high public debt and comparatively low employment rate made structural reform unavoidable.

The breadth of the mobilisation distinguishes 2025 from earlier peaks. ETUI researcher Kurt Vandaele told Belgian media that more than one million strike days was exceptional in historical terms and that action was spread across the year. Education generated 31.3% of all strike days, while the public sector accounted for 49.4%. Food manufacturing, chemicals and petroleum, transport and logistics, and the social-profit sector also experienced unusually heavy action, although Vandaele cautioned that some private-sector stoppages concerned company disputes or sectoral agreements rather than federal policy.

The geography was equally revealing. Wallonia recorded 499 strike days per 1,000 employees and the Brussels-Capital Region 456, against 192 in Flanders. That gap reflects differences in employment structures, union traditions and exposure to public-sector reform, but it should not be read as a simple north-south divide: more than 500,000 strike days were still recorded in Flanders. In Brussels, disruption affected both the city’s residents and commuters working around national and EU institutions; it was not industrial action by the EU institutions themselves.

The competing interpretations are sharply drawn. The unions treated the mobilisation as evidence that the government lacked social consent for reforms with unequal effects. Employers’ organisations emphasised the operational and economic costs of repeated stoppages, while the De Wever government refused to abandon its programme. That disagreement also sits within a wider European debate. The European Commission has long urged Belgium to improve pension sustainability, labour-market participation and public-spending efficiency, while the European social model and the European Social Charter protect collective bargaining and industrial action. The EU context therefore supports reform pressure without deciding how Belgium should distribute its costs.

Belgium’s federal employment ministry notes that Belgian legislation contains no single statutory definition of a strike, although case law recognises the right to stop work and Belgium has ratified the European Social Charter. The headline figure also measures worker-days, not 1.35 million separate strikes: one thousand employees stopping for one day produce one thousand strike days. The record is thus a measure of the scale and duration of lost working time.

The next test is whether the mobilisation alters policy or merely becomes a durable feature of the reform period. Unions have continued campaigning beyond 2025, while the government argues that retreat would pass fiscal costs to future generations. Further pension and labour-market implementation, negotiations with public-sector unions and new mobilisation calls will show whether the record marked a peak or the beginning of a longer breakdown in Belgium’s consensus-based social model.