Who Is Really Behind Belgium’s ‘Mars Attacks’ Teachers?
A sprawling, leaderless collective of teachers has rattled the government of French-speaking Belgium for nearly a year. Now a new investigation is asking the question its own members have long deflected: is Mars Attacks a genuine grassroots uprising — or a political vehicle in disguise?
The answer, according to an RTBF investigation published on 10 September 2026, is neither as clean nor as cynical as either side claims. The collective, which emerged in spring 2026 against the austerity reforms of the MR–Les Engagés coalition, presents itself as a horizontal, cross-network movement of education actors. Its opponents in the governing majority say it is a machine built by the opposition to move the fight from parliament to the streets.
A movement born in a staffroom
The story begins on 10 October 2025, when Sébastien Demarche, a French teacher at the Centre Scolaire Ma Campagne in Ixelles, learned of the education cuts in the press on his 50th birthday. The shock rippled through the staffroom. Two months later, a Facebook page called “Ma Campagne en Résistance” appeared, aimed at pressuring the Les Engagés party into abstaining on the 2026 budget.
That pressure failed. On 17 December 2025, the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (FWB) parliament voted through the budget and its accompanying measures — 255 million euros in savings, including tighter budgets for school supplies and meals, restrictions on early retirement, and a 10 percent increase in the workload of upper-secondary teachers with no salary compensation.
The anger hardened into something bigger. On 20 March 2026, dozens of teachers gathered under a new banner: Mars Attacks – FWB, a nod to Tim Burton’s 1996 film in which aliens descend to upend the American establishment. “We are not doormats!” Demarche declared at the launch.
An elusive structure
The movement has since become the most visible face of the teacher revolt in French-speaking Belgium, overshadowing the trade unions that traditionally fill that role. According to the latest list RTBF obtained, members of one in two secondary schools are now affiliated — a scale the collective itself puts at 343 schools and groups.
But here is where it gets slippery. Mars Attacks has no official spokesperson. It is deliberately horizontal and decentralised, run by 40 coordinators. A member described it to RTBF as a “front mou” — a soft front — that “slips away as soon as you touch it.”
“We need the unions. We are complementary. But we have taken a place in a void they left,” Demarche said. The relationship is not merely rhetorical: with no legal recognition, Mars Attacks cannot file strike notices on its own. Only unions can do that. And the collective’s core demand remains absolute: the total withdrawal of the government’s measures, with no room for negotiation.
The infiltration question
As the movement grew, voices from the MR–Les Engagés majority claimed it was being infiltrated — or noyauté — particularly by Ecolo and the PTB. The accusation had some factual grounding. Two members frequently quoted in the media are politically labelled: Maud de Ridder, a former Ecolo alderman for education in Forest and current Ecolo communal councillor, and Pauline Forges, who appeared on PTB lists for the Brussels Parliament in 2014.
To answer the charge, Mars Attacks took an unusual step: it handed RTBF the identities of its 40 coordinators. After verification, only two had, or had had, public political engagements — one for Ecolo and one for the PTB.
“Obviously some members have activist commitments. But to say we are infiltrated is totally false! No party has its entry points within our movement,” Demarche insisted. Still, he did not pretend the collective was politically neutral. “Not being politicised does not mean we are not political. We are political by essence,” he said, before conceding: “If we are being completely honest, there are a few less blues [MR]. It’s clear. We are no doubt drawn more from the other side of the political chessboard.”
The asymmetry is real. On social media, the favoured targets are Valérie Glatigny, the MR education minister, and Elisabeth Degryse, the Les Engagés minister-president of the FWB. It is the latter’s party — whose voters included many teachers — that draws the deepest anger. “In the staffroom, many voted for Les Engagés. They believed in their project. It is experienced as a genuine betrayal,” Demarche said.
Critics are less generous. A 21 News commentary argued that Mars Attacks “presents itself as an apolitical collective of teachers, but its discourse, its relays and its intellectual references place it clearly in a radical-left activist galaxy.” The outlet noted that even unions were uneasy about the movement’s use of border-line tactics — boycotts, refusals to encode certain results, and professional disobedience.
Beyond the syndicates
A portrait in the Ligue de l’Enseignement described the movement’s rise as a product of a fragmented profession. “As in most schools, we were not used to mobilising. But since the new government arrived, the climate has changed,” said Céline Noël, an early member. “Mars Attacks allowed links to be built between all these worlds.”
That sentiment resonated far beyond Brussels. “Without Mars Attacks, I would have quit the profession,” said Mathieu Hovine, a teacher at the Institut Saint-Dominique. Roland Lahaye, secretary-general of the CSC-Enseignement union, acknowledged the upstart group’s agility: “They have no structure, fewer rules to respect. It gives them a flexibility we cannot have.”
A soft front, and its limits
Representation, however, remains uneven. According to RTBF’s analysis, a third of affiliated secondary schools come from the Brussels region, while less than 20 percent come from the Liège basin and Hainaut. About 70 percent of involved establishments sit in the Catholic subsidised network. Mars Attacks spent this summer trying to decentralise — a summer university in Namur, a general assembly in Liège — but the risk of burnout is real.
The movement is also constrained by its own success. Its most aggressive tactic — calling for the cancellation of the CESS and CE1D external exams and urging schools not to transmit results to the FWB — was rejected outright by Glatigny. She insisted that the exams “guarantee equal treatment between pupils” and that cancelling them “would penalise pupils already struggling.” The exams went ahead in mid-June, affecting some 150,000 pupils.
On 5 June 2026, after a 14-hour session, the FWB parliament voted the decree-programme into law — majority against opposition. The measures are now in force.
What to watch
As the new school year begins, Mars Attacks is reorganising rather than fading. A fresh strike notice runs until 27 September, and the collective says its network now numbers 378 schools and groups. Teachers took to the streets of Liège this week, in numbers the local press estimated at between 5,000 and 13,000.
Yet the movement’s future is uncertain. “I don’t think we are going to disappear. There is still significant anger,” Demarche said. “But it may come more through a convergence of struggles. Mars Attacks was never meant to last more than a few months. But we sense the need to mobilise is still very much present.”
Whether it survives depends on two things its founders cannot fully control: whether the anger outlasts the school calendar, and whether the accusation of infiltration sticks in the public mind. On the first, the evidence of a restless new term suggests momentum remains. On the second, the movement’s own transparency gambit — handing over its coordinators’ identities — may prove its most effective defence.
For now, the Martians have not been disintegrated.