Dave Sinardet is a professor of political science (VUB/UCLouvain). His column appears biweekly on Tuesdays.
And again, and again, and again. Once more, Bart De Wever slides a memo across the table that looks suspiciously like the previous one. Once more, Georges-Louis Bouchez catches the blame with a wide smile, pins it on like an honorary distinction, and parades it past every microphone. Once more, chairpersons call for responsibility. Once more, deadlines are missed. Once more, the government stumbles along.
Everyone swears it cannot go on like this, only for it to continue exactly as before. We might as well start protecting the federal budget ritual as a piece of national political heritage.
Though we should probably not submit that application to Caroline Gennez. The Flemish Culture Minister has just unleashed a slaughter in the heritage sector. Above-local museums are losing 30 percent of their Flemish subsidies, archives 50 percent, and national heritage libraries 100 percent. It is not that she intends to target them, but whenever culture had to make concessions, the knife fell remarkably quickly there.
A restorer knows that sometimes another figure hides beneath a painting: a removed figure, a discarded composition. Flemish Culture Ministers are less discreet. They eagerly paint over their predecessors, preferably before the paint has even dried.
Gennez's predecessor, Jan Jambon, had laid the care for the past in a generous coat of paint. During a culture debate that I moderated in the Bourla shortly before the 2024 elections, I asked his chief of staff, Joachim Pohlmann, about the centerpiece of their policy. He didn't have to search: the substantial heritage investments and the accompanying new decree.
The fact that he planted his flag there and Gennez is setting her axe there is no coincidence. Beneath the budget figures lies an ideological divide: the right claims heritage, the left claims the living arts.
This became apparent in Gennez's defense of her choices. She chooses the 'makers of today': actors, writers, painters, directors... whom she, incidentally, regularly labels as 'critical voices'. In contrast, she does not choose 'institutions'. In the budget tables, that appears to be a synonym for heritage.
The N-VA painted a similar dichotomy during the previous legislature, but shone the light on the other panel. Jambon started with substantial savings on project subsidies, precisely the channel for young artists, alternative voices, and experimentation.
He eventually reversed those, but in Antwerp, N-VA alderman Nabilla Ait Daoud also cut project subsidies. To teach young makers a lesson, she even invoked Rubens as a star witness in an interview: real artists were not deterred by a lack of subsidies. The monarchs and other powerful patrons who paid the Antwerp master's invoices, unfortunately, could no longer be summoned.
Thus, N-VA and Vooruit organize their own little culture wars: old masters are annexed by the right, new makers by the left. Preserving becomes conservative, creating becomes progressive.
It is an absurd political partitioning that denies both the practice and the essence of culture. An archive can be more subversive than a stage: it makes retrievable what those in power would rather forget, what families conceal, or what nations smooth over. A museum can show how many foreign hands worked on our supposed identity. The past rarely adheres to a party program. Or is the passing down of the history of the labor struggle also considered conservative?
Conversely, innovation also has fixed repertoires. No theater invents the future every single evening. New artists borrow from, question, and remodel what their predecessors left behind. Older layers shimmer through their work. Whoever scrapes the preserving and the creating apart, damages the entire canvas.
Elsewhere in Europe, it is primarily (radical-)right-wing politics that draws a front line between national heritage and the leftist art clique. The past is the fatherland, living art is hostile territory. For instance, the French Rassemblement National wants to triple heritage resources at the expense of "enemy of the people" contemporary artists. Gennez claims she wants to protect those critical voices. But she is adopting the enemy's map: makers here, heritage there. In this way, she anchors the right-wing ideological partitioning into her budget. As if the left can only win the future by gifting the past to the right.