Jacqueline Galant is acting to bring a breath of fresh air to the Walloon administration.
From the moment she took office, Jacqueline Galant made a diagnosis: it was time to put an end to decades-old practices, whereby leadership positions were often monopolised by one political family or another, to the detriment of competence and the public interest. "In the Walloon administration, it's terrible! It's excessive politicisation… It has to stop! We're not in that era any more. Today, people really need to be hired on the basis of their skills and no longer their label," she recently stated.
To address this issue, the Minister carried out an ambitious reform of the selection process for top managers. From now on, all candidates are interviewed before a jury made up of government members, in the presence of trade unions and under the supervision of an external law firm. The selection criteria are based on the quality of the project presented and the ability to fit into the vision set out for Wallonia, far from the traditional partisan recommendations.
The Minister goes further by wanting to abolish the requirement for a public management certificate, an “open sesame” that favoured an administrative inner circle, sometimes disconnected from the field and the business world, in order to open up these posts further to profiles from both the private and public sectors.