The scene takes place in the Chamber on Monday. A few deputies, meeting in committee, listen to the remarks of the Minister of Climate and the Environment, Zakia Khattabi (Ecolo). The moment comes for the parliamentarians to speak. Invited to intervene, a Vlaams Belang deputy, Kurt Ravyts, is ironic about the fact that the minister seems to have caught a cold. And adds:I hope it’s because you partied too much yesterday, but in all civility of course .”
The far-right elected official was referring to the victory of the Moroccan football team against Belgium on Sunday and the excesses that followed. Zakia Khattabi was thus sent back to her Moroccan family origins in an inelegant way… To listen to the deputy of Belang, although a federal minister, she would grant her sporting loyalty to Morocco and not to the country where she was born, Belgium.
After this particularly ambiguous intervention, the deputy MR Mathieu Bihet reacted immediately: “I would like these words to appear in the minutes of the discussions that took place today because, even if it is not explicit, ambiguity is always unwelcome on subjects such as what happened in Brussels” on the sidelines of the game. Sometimes, it happens to French-speaking liberals to defend environmentalists…