Brussels, 13 July 2026 — EBM Newsdesk Analysis — Anthony Gill
Bart De Wever’s office announced on Friday that Belgium’s federal government will target €10 billion in savings by 2029, well above the €7.7 billion identified as the minimum needed to keep the country inside its European commitments. Nothing has yet been cut. This is a target, not a package. The measures will be fought over at a budget conclave at the end of September, and deputy prime ministers have been told to clear their diaries from the start of the month. What forced the number up was not Brussels. It was Belgium’s own Federal Debt Agency, which has warned of a snowball effect from 2031, the point at which interest payments on the national debt begin compounding faster than the government can close the gap behind them.
That is why De Wever is pulling the effort forward by two years. A snowball is not a deficit problem. It is the moment a deficit stops being a policy choice and becomes an arithmetic sentence. Belgium is now racing its own interest bill, and it has roughly five years to win.
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The context is unforgiving. Belgium runs a deficit above 4.5% of output and carries public debt of around 105% of GDP, which places it above the EU’s reference values at precisely the moment re-tightened European fiscal rules have begun to bite. The European Commission has ranked it the eurozone’s weakest fiscal performer. The IMF, reviewing the last budget, concluded bluntly that the measures still did not deliver the required adjustment.
And the hole has been growing for a reason that has nothing to do with Belgian politics. When the monitoring committee first assessed the extra savings needed by 2029, it put the figure at €4.9 billion. By May, budget minister Vincent Van Peteghem had revised that to around €7 billion, and he was explicit about why: the earlier estimate had been calculated before the American strike on Iran.
Higher inflation raises the cost of Belgium’s rigidly indexed wages and benefits. Slower growth shrinks the tax base. The oil shock the IEA called the largest in the history of the market did not stop at the petrol pump. It arrived, months later, as a hole in a national budget. This is the under-reported second-order cost of the Iran war, and it is landing hardest on the European states that were already stretched.
De Wever has been here before. His last budget took twenty hours of talks, a threat to resign, and delivered €9.2 billion of consolidation through a partial freeze on wage indexation, higher excise duties, a banking tax and a levy on parcels from outside the EU. It triggered three days of national strikes. He did not reopen it. “Either we change everything, or nothing,” he said at the time.
Finding another €10 billion in that environment is brutal politics. Which is what makes the other half of Belgium’s position so extraordinary.
The €185 billion in the basement
Euroclear, the securities depository headquartered in Brussels, holds the overwhelming majority of the Russian central bank assets immobilised by Western sanctions — roughly €185 billion. The European Commission wants to use them to fund a substantial loan to Ukraine. De Wever has refused to agree without watertight guarantees from other member states.
He is not being sentimental about Moscow. He is being arithmetic about Belgium. If the scheme is later found unlawful, or Russia wins a claim, the entity holding the assets is first in line and the state standing behind it is second. The liability would dwarf the budget gap he is currently straining to close.
The events of this week in a Frankfurt courtroom explain exactly why he is hesitating. Deutsche Bank and UniCredit are suing Linde to recover €1 billion that Russian courts seized from them after they refused, on sanctions grounds, to honour guarantees on a Russian gas project. Nobody in that case broke any law. Linde complied. The banks complied. The money vanished regardless, and the compliant parties are now fighting each other over who absorbs it, because European sanctions were written without any mechanism to allocate the losses they create.
De Wever has read that lesson. So has every finance ministry in Europe. The enforcement contradictions already running through the EU’s own sanctions regime do not inspire confidence that Brussels would step in to carry the cost itself, and the 21st sanctions package now being finalised contains no such mechanism either.
Why this matters beyond Belgium
Two things follow, and neither is comfortable.
Europe’s most ambitious plan to fund Ukraine is hostage to the fiscal weakness of one member state. Belgium is not blocking the asset scheme out of sympathy for Russia. It is blocking it because it cannot afford the downside and nobody has offered to indemnify it. That is a failure of European solidarity being reported as a Belgian obstruction.
And Belgium is a preview, not an outlier. Its deficit, its indexed welfare state, its ageing population and its exposure to imported inflation are not unique. It is simply further down the road. France has already rejected a budget. Others will meet the same arithmetic, and the same European fiscal rules that are now forcing De Wever’s hand.
The country holding Europe’s biggest financial weapon cannot afford to fire it. That is the position Brussels finds itself in, in both senses of the word.
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