MR chairman Georges-Louis Bouchez was a guest in De Afspraak on VRT on Friday evening, but did not speak a word of Dutch. Why does he still stick to French about ten weeks before the elections? “I don’t want my election campaign to revolve around one mistake.”
Friday, March 29, 2024 at 10:08 PM
We only have about ten weeks to go until the elections, but the party chairman of the Walloon Liberals is currently refusing to speak a word of Dutch on Flemish television. Even when he is a guest in a VRT TV studio.
Presenter of De Afspraak, Ivan De Vadder, asked him whether he will really be able to make a difference in his knowledge of Dutch by June 9? “We are not there yet,” Bouchez responded, as he assured that he is learning Dutch. “But I have already made a lot of progress. When I meet viewers on the street, we speak Dutch. But I want to be sure of my case here, because I have a lot of friends here. So if I made even a small mistake, you would see it in all the programs and newspapers. And I don’t want my election campaign to revolve around that. So don’t worry, I’m working on it.”
So no Dutch, but the party chairman also had a political message to deliver on Friday evening. For example, Bouchez said that after the June elections he wants to do everything he can to form a center-right government. And at the same time he wants to exclude negotiations with parties that would collaborate with Vlaams Belang or PTB/PVDA at other levels. “We have always been clear. We do not want a coalition agreement with Vlaams Belang or the PVDA,” he says. “We also do not want to collaborate with parties that conclude agreements with those extreme parties.”
This applies, for example, to the PS, if they wanted to collaborate with PTB/PVDA, but also to N-VA they had to find a partner in Vlaams Belang. Bouchez does clarify that he is mainly talking about regional collaborations. Locally he thinks it’s a different story.
