We begin this notebook with a question: May 1st, is it a left-wing or right-wing holiday? We asked the question to the militant workers who gathered under the banners of the MR, the PS and the PTB for this May 1st and the answers are unanimous: the socialists think that it is socialist, for the liberals, this holiday is now liberal and for the activists of the Belgian Labor Party, Labor Day is obviously theirs.
Let’s now move on to the discussion of the week: it comes down to the PS which is still trying to remove the sticking plaster of the PTB vote from its front. Indeed, the PS is therefore still trying to convince that it did not need the PTB to pass the landscape decree to the parliament of the Wallonia-Brussels federation. “We didn’t need it” noted Frédéric Daerden, while Raoul Hedebouw is convinced of the opposite. “The PS keeps saying that it didn’t need it, but just look at the figures, without our votes, it wouldn’t have passed!“, he exclaims.
For information, it is true that for the final vote in plenary, the PTB was not essential. But without their support in committee a week earlier. Nothing would have been possible…
The controversy of the week
The controversy of the week concerns our Minister of Justice, affected by a touch of ordinary racism. Paul Van Tigchelt is also a campaigning minister. He responded to a media invitation on the networks and everything was going well until this response concerning the desire of the far right to stop immigration. “Without immigration, who will provide health care here? Who will take care of our pipes? Who cleans my windows at home?“, he asked.
The host then grimaces, uncomfortable, but the Minister clarifies. “Without immigration, our economy stops, that’s all!“.
Finally, the meatball of the week goes to the eco-friendly Zakia Khattabi. The current Minister of Climate published a visual on the networks, where we can read the names of the successive Brussels minister-presidents. All represented by the face of a little old man… You should know, Zakia Khattabi aims to become the first woman to lead Brussels.
The publication hurt the daughter of the late Jacques Simonet, former minister-president of Brussels, who made it known publicly. “No, Madame Khattabi, my father was not an old man, in fact he never had the opportunity to be one, or even to be your age. He was 35 when he became minister-president, 13 years younger than you“, she explained. For information, Jacques Simonet died at 43 from a pulmonary embolism.
“There is no need for controversy, we are in the campaign and I have deep respect for Mr. Simonet“, Zakia Khattabi tried to defend herself. “It’s a caricature, these characters are cute and I wanted to use them so as not to use the photos of the people involved“.
Campaign diary
