More than four hundred people attended the debate between Georges-Louis Bouchez and Jean-Marie Dedecker in Diksmuide on Wednesday evening. The event, organised by the Kiwanis service club, brought together two political heavyweights for a frank exchange. Proceeds went to Pêcheur de lune, a Walloon charity that fulfils the dreams of disadvantaged children.
Unsurprisingly, the two liberals agreed on a wide range of issues. Bouchez hammered home his priorities: reindustrialising the country, guaranteeing affordable energy and reducing the tax burden.
The MR President diagnoses a state that has “become obese”, noting that “55% of our GDP is public spending”, with a tax system that stifles both work and investment. For him, the priority is to reduce public spending in order to significantly ease the burden on middle incomes. He rejects any VAT increase and stresses that in a country where many people must live on €1,600, €1,700 or €2,000 a month, losing a few dozen euros at the end of the month is not nothing.
He also rejects the left-wing rhetoric about so-called “super-rich” and “ultra-rich” people who should supposedly be taxed more heavily. In his view, this vocabulary is mainly an empty slogan, with no serious, quantified definition of what wealth actually is. In “the most heavily taxed country in the world”, he argues, any new tax ultimately falls on the shoulders of ordinary people, which he sums up with the principle that “the masses are the cash register”. “In the end, it's always the middle class that pays the bill, and the MR doesn't want that”, Bouchez insists.
In his view, reindustrialisation and affordable energy are at the heart of a credible economic strategy. He warns against Europe's decline, recalling that in 2000, 36 of the world's 100 largest companies were European, compared to just 9 today. He attributes part of this fall to dogmatic climate zealotry that “destroyed our industry without saving the climate”, simply by exporting CO₂ emissions outside Europe. Defending nuclear power, Bouchez repeats that his party narrowly averted a disaster scenario: “Without the MR's intervention on 22 December 2021, the nuclear phase-out would have been set in stone, and when war broke out in Ukraine, we would have found ourselves in a particularly critical energy situation.”
Purchasing power and freedom
On climate, he contrasts a technological liberalism with what he calls an “ecological religion”: in his view, the energy transition must be based on growth, innovation and “scientific evidence”, without endangering citizens' purchasing power or freedom. In other words, no new green tax that would further erode household incomes.
After the debate, Bouchez stayed for almost two hours talking with the large crowd that had turned out. He answered questions, accepted words of encouragement with a smile, posed for numerous photos with Flemish supporters and left with several invitations to return to West Flanders very soon.