Egbert Lachaert Leaves Anders as Flemish Liberals Face Turmoil

Egbert Lachaert, a former president of Belgium’s Flemish liberal party, announced on Sunday evening, 20 September, that he is leaving Anders and will sit as an independent in the Flemish Parliament, the latest defection to shake a party already struggling for its identity and its survival. The departure of a former leader is rarely trivial — and it lands harder in a party that had just changed its name in a bid to turn the page on its past.

According to RTBF, Lachaert ended 26 years of active membership with a Facebook post in which he called it “one of the hardest decisions of my entire political career.” “From this week I no longer sit for Anders, but as an independent member in the Flemish Parliament,” he wrote, as reported by VRT NWS. He will keep his seat for the remainder of his mandate and continues to serve as mayor of Merelbeke-Melle.

A Personal Rift With Party Consequences

The immediate trigger, RTBF reports, was the loss roughly two weeks earlier of his position as leader of the Anders group in the Flemish Parliament, which passed to Stephanie D’Hose, his former party vice-president. President Frederic De Gucht had reportedly wanted to replace Lachaert as group leader over time, alongside federal group leader Alexia Bertrand — and the plan leaked to the press before it was officially communicated. “It was painful to read in the press certain things that came from my own party,” Lachaert said.

Political scientist Dave Sinardet of the VUB told RTBF the rupture has deep personal roots stretching back to 2024, when Lachaert and Jean-Jacques De Gucht — brother of the current president — fought for second place on the East Flanders list. Lachaert prevailed and was elected to the Flemish Parliament. “Even if Egbert Lachaert did clash with the De Gucht clan in 2024, no structural war now splits the party into distinct blocs,” Sinardet cautioned.

Sinardet argued the episode revives an image the party tried to bury. “Frederic De Gucht had tried to erase the image of Open VLD — a party where members bicker all the time, even kill each other, more preoccupied with their egos than the party’s interest,” he said. “That image is back, and everyone is saying: in the end, Anders isn’t so different.”

Loyalty and Disloyalty Inside the Party

Reaction within Anders has been largely unforgiving. “Incomprehensible for a former president,” wrote former Flemish minister Dirk Van Mechelen on Facebook, invoking Lachaert’s late father, a storied liberal. “What would PL think of this?”

Marino Keulen, mayor of Lanaken and a former minister, was blunt: “I have no understanding for this.” He called Lachaert’s late-Sunday departure disloyal, while conceding it had “the advantage of clarity. Everyone knew it would come to this.”

Jo De Ro, mayor of Vilvoorde, framed it as a matter of allegiance. “You stay loyal to your party, just as you stay loyal to your football team, even in difficult times,” he said, adding: “Politics is like cycling: when you face a headwind, you don’t change bikes, you just pedal harder.”

Yet not everyone agreed. Tim Vandenput, mayor of Hoeilaart and a former liberal MP, revealed he too had quietly left the party months ago, without renewing his membership card. “I think Anders is steering a course far too far to the left, as if it were the D66 of Flanders,” he said, referring to the Dutch social-liberal party.

A Right Wing Walking Out of a Leftward Party

Lachaert is not the first to leave. In April 2025, Flemish MP Maurits Vande Reyde quit Open VLD to sit as an independent before launching the movement Durf. For more than 25 years, RTBF notes, the party’s right wing has periodically bolted — Ward Beysen, Jean-Marie Dedecker and Hugo Coveliers all founded their own parties, while others such as Ludo Van Campenhout and Annick De Ridder defected to the nationalist N-VA.

At the heart of these departures is an ideological complaint. “The ‘L’ in Open VLD doesn’t stand for ‘liberal,’ but for ‘links’ — left,” Rudy Aernoudt, a former Open VLD chief of staff now close to the Francophone liberal MR, said on Radio 1.

The tension is awkward for De Gucht’s strategy. Anders has sought to re-anchor itself on a more assertive socio-economic right, but it is precisely figures from the right, such as Lachaert, who are leaving — while the left-leaning D’Hose now leads the Flemish parliamentary group. “With Stephanie D’Hose, a left-wing liberal, at the head of the Flemish group, Frederic De Gucht sees the ghosts of the past resurfacing,” Sinardet said.

The Weight of a Name Change

Anders — Dutch for “different” — was unveiled in January 2026 as part of an effort to break with the baggage of the Open VLD brand, itself the successor to a lineage stretching back to the VLD, the PVV and the Liberal Party of 1846. As RTBF’s analysis of the rebranding noted, a new name does not change the faces: most Flemish MPs are former ministers or former party presidents, fundamentally associated with the party’s past.

The rebranding followed a leadership crisis. Eva De Bleeker, who took the helm after the party’s heavy June 2024 election defeat, resigned as president in August 2025, clearing the way for De Gucht, son of former minister and EU Commissioner Karel De Gucht.

The electoral record behind the turmoil is stark. Open VLD was Belgium’s largest party in 2003 under Guy Verhofstadt, with 25 Chamber seats. It fell to 18 in 2007 and 13 in 2010, then to just 5.5 percent of the vote and seven seats in 2024. In the Flemish Parliament, it slid from 25 seats in 2004 to nine in 2024 — and continues to hover near the electoral threshold in the polls.

What to Watch

East Flanders has long been a liberal battleground shared among three dynasties — the De Guchts, the Verhofstadts and the De Croos — and no war now cuts the party into opposing camps, Sinardet stressed. But the pattern is what troubles the leadership: it is the right flank that keeps walking out.

Beyond Durf, a fresh threat looms in Georges-Louis Bouchez’s floated idea of an MR Vlaanderen, a Flemish wing of the Francophone liberals. Aernoudt presented it as a fallback: “The best would be if MR Vlaanderen weren’t necessary — that we had a good liberal party winning 25 percent in Flanders. It’s a plan B.”

Sinardet was skeptical, suggesting a non-aggression pact between Bouchez and N-VA leader Bart De Wever could be equally plausible, since the two occupy similar ideological ground. For now, Anders’s best asset, he said, is the charisma and communication skill of its president — though it remains unclear whether that will be enough. “Anders will have to hope the N-VA’s image tarnishes, then convince voters it is a real alternative,” he said.

As Lachaert put it when closing his post: “Relationship breakups are rarely a pretty show to watch.” For the Flemish liberals, the question now is whether this one is a prelude to something worse.