The Mouvement Réformateur put self-employed workers and SMEs at the heart of its congress, with a panel bringing together the Minister for SMEs, the Self-Employed and Middle Classes, Éléonore Simonet, architect Cyril Rousseaux (founder of the Carré 7 firm) and Vincent Michel (director of GO4ZERO and member of Holcim Belgium's executive committee). Together, they discussed how to rekindle the desire to start a business in Belgium, while successfully delivering the ecological transition and strengthening the competitiveness of our economy.
The first question, put by Cyril Rousseaux, starts from an observation: “Entrepreneurship is sometimes seen as complex and risky: what needs to change quickly to encourage more young people to set up an SME in Belgium?”. In his architecture firm of 23 employees, with an average age of 34, he notes a reluctance among some staff to get more involved in taking over the business, out of fear of the future, economic uncertainty and administrative burdens.
Minister Éléonore Simonet replied by recalling that entrepreneurship is above all about daring, innovating and taking risks, and that risk-taking must be valued, not penalised. She stressed that Belgium does not yet sufficiently celebrate the boldness of young and not-so-young people who take the plunge, even though they are the ones who create tomorrow's prosperity. She outlined several concrete levers: reforming and extending the student-entrepreneur status, created in 2017 and increasingly successful, to allow more young people to test a business project while continuing their studies, without being immediately crushed by charges.
The Minister also highlights other instruments, such as regulatory “sandboxes” for innovative projects in artificial intelligence, which offer a secure, lighter framework for experimentation without immediately facing all the usual regulatory constraints.
She then focuses on an essential dimension of entrepreneurial culture: the right to a second chance. In a country where failure is still often seen as a stigma, she argues that non-fraudulent bankruptcy should not condemn an entire career.
Her ambition: to ensure that the entrepreneur “never loses”, either by succeeding or by learning. In concrete terms, she backs measures such as granting a new business number after a non-fraudulent bankruptcy and a right to be delisted from public search engines, so that past failure does not become a permanent label but an episode overcome. This culture of second chances lies at the heart of the MR's liberal vision: freeing up initiative, reducing fear of risk and encouraging young people to take the plunge rather than remain onlookers.
The second question, put by Vincent Michel, tackles another major challenge: the ecological transition. He notes that “SMEs are asked to innovate, decarbonise and invest quickly. As Minister for SMEs, are you prepared to accept more public risk to avoid a situation where only large companies can truly transform?”. He points out that large companies have greater access to powerful financial tools and major European schemes, while smaller businesses often lack the time and resources to secure this support. The Minister acknowledges that decarbonisation is an unavoidable goal by 2050, for large industries as well as smaller businesses, including the public sector, which is still too often housed in poorly insulated buildings. But she stresses one point: this transition cannot come at the expense of SME competitiveness, since SMEs represent the vast majority of private employers and more than half of jobs in Belgium. That is why the government, of which the MR is part, has reintroduced degressive depreciation for certain innovative, particularly energy-saving, investments and strengthened tax deductions for such investments, to make the transition ecologically ambitious yet economically bearable.
Finally, a question from the audience, put by Lionel Rooy, opened up a third angle: “Why doesn't Hainaut have industrial free zones like those in France? This scheme boosts investment, the reindustrialisation of an area, the arrival of new families, and gives a lift to towns and villages. I live in the lovely town of Soignies, where an industrial zone is just waiting for investors, but is it a free zone?”.
Minister Simonet explained that Belgium has chosen a different model, based on “support zones” created to help regions affected by large-scale collective redundancies, such as after the closure of major industrial sites. These zones grant partial exemption from payroll tax for a certain period, where new investments and job creation occur, but they are temporary and targeted. For Éléonore Simonet, the challenge is twofold: to allow regions such as Wallonia to target areas in crisis, while pursuing a national strategy to strengthen competitiveness. She recalled that the government has freed up significant resources to reduce labour costs and support SME investment, with the aim of making Belgium, more than a country with a few “free zones”, a genuine “national free zone” where it is good to do business anywhere on its territory.
The MR wants to make Belgium a country where entrepreneurship once again becomes a natural instinct, a valued career choice, rather than an obstacle course. By working simultaneously on the culture around failure, support for young people, tax tools for the ecological transition and targeted instruments for struggling areas, the liberal family is positioning itself as the ally of self-employed workers and SMEs, whom it regards as the backbone of the economy.
To meet the challenges of 2050, Belgium needs more freedom to do business, less red tape and greater trust in those who take risks.