Belgian Entrepreneurs Tell De Wever Where to Find 10 Billion

With Prime Minister Bart De Wever (N-VA) hunting for roughly 10 billion euros to bring Belgium’s federal budget back on track, three of the country’s most prominent entrepreneurs have weighed in with a strikingly unified message: fix the spending, not the taxpayer. In an exclusive roundtable published by Het Laatste Nieuws, Fernand Huts, Roland Duchatelet and Jurgen Ingels argue that the current system actively incentivises overspending and that new taxes should be a last resort.

“A budget is simply a consequence of the strength of the economy,” Huts, the 76-year-old chairman of logistics multinational Katoen Natie, told HLN. “You must first ensure that you have a strong economy and are able to bake a big cake.”

The Scale of the Problem

The government faces a deficit projected at 30.3 billion euros next year, rising to 38.3 billion by 2029 — equivalent to 5.2 percent of GDP, according to De Morgen. While the Monitoring Committee estimates at least 7.7 billion euros is needed to comply with the European expenditure norm by 2029, De Wever has deliberately set the bar higher at 10 billion in order to reassure financial markets.

The timetable is tight. De Wever wants the negotiations wrapped up by mid-October, ahead of his State of the Union address and a European deadline for submitting Belgium’s budget plans. Officials opened the first formal talks on 12 September, and De Wever has insisted he will not solve the problem through new taxes. “Those who say this government is trying to fix things with revenue are mistaken,” he told VRT NWS in early September.

The urgency is real. Belgium’s long-term borrowing rate has climbed above 3.8 percent — its highest level since 2012 — prompting economists to warn that the country is edging toward a debt “snowball” in which interest payments crowd out other spending, as VRT NWS reported. “If politicians don’t intervene themselves, the financial markets will ultimately decide for them,” economist Selien De Schryder warned.

Three Recipes, One Common Thread

Despite different emphases, the three entrepreneurs converge on a central diagnosis: the state rewards waste. Duchatelet, the 79-year-old tech billionaire, pointed to a concrete perversity in how public services are funded. Departments, he said, are sometimes encouraged to spend any leftover budget before year-end for fear of receiving less the following year. “That system actually incentivises spending money rather than being thrifty,” he told HLN.

Huts called for a radical cultural shift. “I am not pleading for tax advantages, but above all you must not impose all kinds of obstacles on someone who wants to do business,” he said, singling out bureaucracy, slow procedures and a lack of legal certainty. He argued Belgium’s civil service “still works according to a structure from the nineteenth century” and urged the government to mobilise public servants themselves for savings ideas.

Ingels, 55, a tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist, focused on the country’s layered governance. “Simplify the government, make working attractive again, and close backdoors in the system,” he said. His sharpest image was one of distance between decision-makers and payers: “Public money in our country sometimes seems too much like Monopoly money.”

Where They Disagree

The entrepreneurs’ agreement frays once the conversation turns to sacred cows. Duchatelet insisted nothing is off-limits. “There is nothing within the government of which you can say that absolutely no savings can be made,” he said, pointing to potential cuts in administration, subsidies, defence, education and healthcare alike. He argued 30 billion euros a year could be saved across all policy levels.

Ingels drew a firmer line. “What we may not save on are education and healthcare,” he said, describing education as the foundation of future prosperity and quality care as a pillar of society. He also excluded defence, framing military spending as an insurance policy. “A strong defence actually reduces the chance of conflict,” he argued.

Huts chose culture as his red line. “What in my eyes you may never save on is culture,” he said. “Culture provides connection in a society. You must feel: we’re going for it. If the whole doesn’t hold together, it doesn’t work.”

All three, however, shared one further conviction: technology, and artificial intelligence in particular, can shrink the cost of government. Huts was the most bullish, describing AI as “there for the taking,” while Ingels was more measured, insisting that jobs must be assessed process by process rather than simply cutting civil servants.

A Context That Complicates the Message

Huts’s advice arrives with an awkward footnote. In May 2026, the civil court of Antwerp convicted three core Katoen Natie companies of tax abuse, finding that more than 180 million euros in dividends had flowed untaxed through Luxembourg to a trust in Jersey. The court ruled the construction lacked economic substance and existed solely to avoid Belgian withholding tax, as Flows reported. The companies were ordered to pay roughly 54.5 million euros in avoided tax.

That conviction may colour how the public receives his counsel on austerity — a dynamic that also plays out against a broader political backdrop, in which coalition partners have drawn stark red lines. CD&V has resisted scrapping the company-car system, MR has come out against VAT increases, and the unions have announced a protest march on 9 October with the threat of a general strike. Meanwhile, MR leader Georges-Louis Bouchez has floated a rival plan worth 17 billion euros, including closing train stations, cutting ministers and not replacing three in five retiring civil servants, as HLN detailed.

The Harder Question

Economists broadly agree the entrepreneurs are right that the money will have to come mainly from spending. But they caution that finding 10 billion is not the real challenge. “Finding 10 billion will not even be the hardest task,” reads the headline of an HLN analysis featuring economists Gert Peersman, Paul De Grauwe and Bart Van Craeynest. The genuine difficulty, they argue, is cutting without strangling economic growth, which fell to zero in the second quarter of 2026.

That tension helps explain why the entrepreneurs’ emphasis on growth-friendly, spending-side measures resonates with economists even as the political path remains fraught. Each percentage point of economic growth, HLN noted, is worth roughly 3 billion euros in additional revenue to the treasury — money that would do more for the budget than any single austerity measure.

What to Watch

Whether the entrepreneurs’ diagnosis survives contact with coalition politics remains the central question. De Wever has a self-imposed deadline of mid-October, a protest movement building on the streets, and coalition partners whose red lines leave little room to manoeuvre.

What the roundtable does establish is that a rare consensus now spans much of Belgium’s economic establishment: the country’s budget problem is, at its root, a spending problem. Whether that consensus can be converted into the roughly 10 billion euros the government needs — and on the terms its political partners will accept — is likely to be decided in the coming weeks.