Georges-Louis Bouchez faced the true representative of the left yesterday on RTL TVI, Raoul Hedebouw. On the agenda of this lively debate: the cordon sanitaire, taxation and work, pensions, security, wars, and also asylum and migration. One thing is clear for the MR President: "As a liberal, I will never form a coalition with the far right or the far left. These are matters of values".
This live debate was an opportunity to highlight the political projects of the two parties. Projects that are worlds apart: "We, at the MR, want fewer poor people and more rich people. With the PTB's model, ultimately it will be the middle class that pays the bill, because it will always be taxed more".
Georges-Louis Bouchez also criticised the PTB's proposals on pensions: "The PTB today is the Party of Taxes and Talk". "The PTB proposes lowering the retirement age. The problem is that bringing the pension age back to 65 amounts to bankrupting our pension system. It's our children who won't benefit from it. On the other hand, we want to take into account the difficulty of work to calculate the retirement age", explains the MR President.
On security: "What doesn't work is that police officers are asked to take on 147 additional tasks beyond what is provided for in the police law". Despite a relatively high number of police officers per inhabitant in Belgium, the problem for us lies in the overload of tasks imposed on officers.
For the MR, it is necessary to use the army to maintain order! "When we had soldiers on the streets of Brussels, we managed to reduce crime by 5%, and certain offences dropped by 12%", explains Georges-Louis Bouchez, highlighting the positive impact of this measure.