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King Philippe of Belgium refused Prime Minister Bart De Wever’s resignation on Friday and ordered him to resume budget negotiations immediately, pulling the country back from the brink of a political crisis that could have triggered snap elections.
“The King has decided to decline the Prime Minister’s resignation and has asked him to resume the budget negotiations immediately,” the royal palace said in a statement. De Wever will report back to the king on Monday, November 16.
De Wever, a Flemish conservative who has led a five-party center-right coalition since February 2025, offered his resignation on Monday after months of budget talks between the coalition parties collapsed. The king held off on a decision and spent the week meeting each of the five party leaders.
Those meetings produced a way back. “Following his discussions with the leaders of the five majority parties, the King noted that each of them wishes to conclude the budget negotiations as quickly as possible,” the palace said, adding that he had received “a formal commitment from the five party leaders that their respective parties are prepared to make concessions in order to reach an agreement within the government.”
Why De Wever offered to quit
The government has spent months trying to find roughly 10 billion euros in savings by 2029 to bring down a deficit that ran at 5.2% of economic output in 2025 and to keep Belgium within European spending rules. Public debt has climbed past 108% of GDP, and De Wever has warned of a “snowball” effect in which the state borrows simply to service existing debt. He had pushed for a deal to show financial markets Belgium was on track to meet its European obligations, POLITICO reported.
Talks ran through the weekend and broke up without agreement early Monday morning. The sticking points were tax and spending. The Flemish socialists of Vooruit demanded bigger contributions from the highest incomes, while the French-speaking center-right Reformist Movement ruled that out and also opposed a wider value-added tax reform. “Far too many taxes on the table,” MR deputy prime minister David Clarinval told reporters as the talks collapsed. De Wever’s N-VA and the MR favor deeper spending cuts, particularly in healthcare, while Vooruit and the Francophone centrist Les Engagés pushed for higher taxes on wealth and lighter social cuts, with the CD&V trying to hold the middle ground.
De Wever had repeatedly ruled out starting 2027 on provisional “twelfths” – an emergency arrangement that caps monthly spending at one-twelfth of the previous year’s budget. On Thursday he told parliament the country would have no choice, calling the failure to agree a full budget “a terrible failure on the part of the government.”
A premier markets know
De Wever, 55, became prime minister in February 2025 after more than a decade as mayor of Antwerp, where he built a reputation as a fiscal conservative. EUalive noted that markets have pushed Belgian bond yields higher as the talks dragged on, raising the cost of the deadlock his resignation offer was meant to break. Analysts in Belgian media credit him with keeping a five-party coalition – spanning Flemish nationalists, Christian democrats, liberals and socialists – intact through two years of austerity fights, and the palace said all five leaders recommitted to concessions under his continued premiership rather than risk elections.
Outspoken for Belgium’s Jews
De Wever has also been one of Europe’s most outspoken leaders in support of Jewish life. Speaking at a May 6 Antwerp event commemorating the end of World War II and the Holocaust, he condemned what he called “the new antisemitic way of thinking that is being normalized and thus becoming embedded in society,” adding: “The first point of contact for antisemitism in this country, that is me,” The Brussels Times reported. The event took place the same day Antwerp prosecutors confirmed the indictment of three mohels who perform religious circumcisions, a case that has alarmed the city’s Orthodox Jewish community and drawn condemnation from Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
“As Prime Minister I will always take full responsibility to safeguard the security and wellbeing of our Jewish community, in Antwerp, in Belgium and in Europe,” De Wever told the European Jewish Association in a video message in November 2025. As Antwerp mayor he hosted the Conference of European Rabbis and publicly called himself “a friend of Israel.”
Had the king accepted the resignation, Belgium would likely have faced early elections. For now, De Wever stays in office with 10 days to show the talks can produce a deal.
JBizNews Desk | Brussels
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