November 2023

2023-11-08 09:32:00

There has been uproar in Vivaldi since the president of the PS Paul Magnette announced that he was burying the anti-thugs law. His counterpart from the MR Georges-Louis Bouchez responded by declaring that there was no question of guillotining the “Bodson law”, which punishes any malicious obstruction of traffic, as well as a series of other points of the reform of the Penal Code. Therefore, he threatens to block a series of other agreements, such as the one on reducing VAT on demolition to 6% or the law on games of chance.

Environmentalists then came to support the position of the socialists. On Monday, Vice-Premier Georges Gilkinet described the law as “liberticide”. This Tuesday, Petra de Sutter (Groen) assures us that she wants to “protect the right to demonstrate” because “it is a fundamental right in democracy”. “We share the concerns of Ecolo and the PS. The discussion will be relaunched within the kern,” the Vice-Premier tells us.

The MR threatens to reopen other files in the event of a blockage from the left on the “anti-thugs” law

Among liberals, both Flemish and French-speaking, we are getting exasperated. The text has already been approved twice by the federal government and, each time, the socialists as well as the environmentalists validated it. This ambition to reform justice launched by Koen Geens (CD&V) under the previous legislature is one of Vivaldi’s flagship projects. It was carried with great conviction by the former Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne (Open VLD) and his successor Paul Van Tigchelt (Open VLD) intended to see it through.

After the green light in July, the text now had to pass into the hands of parliamentarians. But following the opinion of the Council of State and the Federal Institute of Human Rights (IFDH), it turned out that government controllers would not yet be able to carry out their work on this text. The administrative court had declared that a judicial ban on demonstrations was possible, unless it was considered disproportionate. This point had worried trade union organizations such as the FGTB, but also NGOs such as Amnesty International or Greenpeace. This is what justified the backpedaling of the left parties.

Would the PS be more concerned by the opinion of the socialist union than by the fate of the population of Brussels? This is the idea that turns to the right, where we recall that the idea of ​​the law comes from Mayor Philippe Close (PS). The Vice-Premier “Pierre-Yves Dermagne was stripped naked by the FGTB”, bellows a parliamentarian.

The text therefore returns to the hands of the government. The issue will be discussed bilaterally before probably landing on Friday at the Kern table. “It’s yet another crisis”, sums up calmly from a Vice-Prime, who takes the MR’s announcement as a bluff. The liberals would have no interest in blocking the reform of the Penal Code because the entire arsenal of security measures that they have been demanding for months would be linked to this reform.

“It’s not worrying,” we sweep to the left. “We will find a solution, as usual.”

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