The possibility of “16”
She could have become Prime Minister in the early 1990s, but minds were not ready, she wrote in her memoir published in 2018: “You deserve to become Prime Minister, Johan Van Hecke told me, then president of the CVP, in 1994, when Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene had the possibility of becoming president of the European Commission. But as I expect too much opposition, I will still choose someone. else.”
In terms of her personal life, she also made an impression. In 2008, she married former Prime Minister Wilfried Martens (who died five years later). Miet Smet also concluded her memoirs with a letter to Wilfried Martens, whom she said she loved all her life.
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“We were a couple, linked by our feelings for each other, but also by common projects, leaving room for personal commitments. To my great sadness, our relationship nevertheless broke down. Wilfried became a father again and got married for the second time. At that point, the discord became too much for me,” she confided.
So it was only in 2008 that they met again. “Even though I had felt very hurt during the period when we were separated, I then resolutely chose to definitively turn these painful pages and reconnect with the happiness we had experienced together before. An old love does not rust. I am convinced that Wilfried experienced our reconciliation as a sort of definitive return home.”
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An old macho world…
The president of the CD&V, Sammy Mahdi, paid tribute to the memory of one of the great figures of Christian democracy in Belgium. “Our country is losing a great lady,” he said. “In the macho world of a few decades ago, she stood unwaveringly on the barricades to defend women’s rights and greater equality between men and women.”
Thursday, during the weekly plenary session, the deputies of the House of Representatives observed a minute of silence in tribute to Miet Smet. After the Christmas holidays, another tribute will be paid in the hemicycle, to which Ms. Smet’s family will also be invited.
