Live elections | N-VA proposes a healthcare plan, but does not want to talk about saving on healthcare

The N-VA will not announce its election manifesto until next Sunday, but is already presenting one for Brussels. With good polls in hand, the party is ready to possibly enter the policy level in the Brussels Region, “after more than thirty years of PS policy”. “We realize that we have to be ‘incontournable’,” says Cieltje Van Achter, party leader for the Brussels Parliament.

The party focuses first and foremost on safety. “Due to numerous shooting incidents resulting in deaths and injuries, certain working-class neighborhoods have been turned into no-go zones,” it said. This has not a little to do with the drug violence in the city. To curb this, a kind of hotline should be created: citizens could anonymously report the location of dealer gangs, a cannabis plantation or a drug laboratory at a regional drug hotline. Drug users must also be kept out of metro stations: “a metro station is not a homeless shelter,” said Van Achter.

However, the party sees the most important measure as a unified police force for the entire region. The party wants to abolish the nineteen municipalities and replace them with districts, just as is already the case in Antwerp and Paris. The OCMWs will also be merged. “One city region, one policy,” the text says.

“It simply cannot be more inefficient,” said party chairman Bart De Wever at the press conference about N-VA’s Brussels plan. “Six police zones in one city, that’s just crazy. When a helicopter flies over Brussels, it has to report to six commands. Do you know how long it takes for such a helicopter to cross a police zone? Three seconds!”

“If you were to do an input-output analysis of Brussels, the result would be simply terrible,” he continues. “The people of Brussels are over-equipped, with a federal metro brigade and the deployment of the federal police per capita is double that of Antwerp. And yet there is so little output. If you don’t start merging the municipalities “to one city council with 70 councilors and one mayor or prime minister – call it what you want – then you will never get out of misery. Brussels has sunk into a financial swamp, while it is over-endowed per capita.”

That is why the party makes the region’s budget a priority. Some of the keys here lie at the federal level: to get more Brussels residents to work, unemployment must be limited in time. This generates more income, but expenditure also needs to be cut. The party does defend the further expansion of Metro 3, but also wants to install an “expenditure standard”. “No more with the hand-out policy.”

“Because of socialist mismanagement”, the middle class would leave the city and companies would turn their backs on Brussels. But the party, even in its confederal model, does not intend to let go of the capital. For example, Dutch must be strengthened in the Brussels administrations. The party also wants to continue the major investment in Dutch-language education in Brussels. In the field of mobility, the party uncomplicatedly takes the side of the weak road user and proposes a network of separated cycle paths.