Ln September 24, the resigned government of Alexander De Croo requested that the deadline for submitting a draft budgetary plan to the European Commission be pushed back to the end of 2024.
Belgium’s permanent representative to the European Union, Peter Moors, sent a new missive on December 26 to once again postpone this deadline.
According to the Belgian press, there is no request for a new formal date in the letter, but it expresses the hope of “being able to prepare the Belgian medium-term budgetary plan”.
“In the near future”, Belgium could present “a plan based on a strong political commitment on the part of the new federal government”, further promises the letter addressed to the European Commission.
As part of the excessive deficit procedure opened against it by the Commission, Belgium must submit to the European Commission a draft budgetary plan for 2025 as well as a multi-annual path for consolidating its public finances, accompanied by reforms and of investments.
At the end of November, the EC provisionally recommended to Belgium a 4-year corrective trajectory within the framework of reinforced budgetary surveillance.
In the meantime, in the absence of a full government, the House of Representatives (lower house of the federal Parliament) adopted in December a finance bill containing the provisional twelfths for the first quarter of 2025.
This technique consists of releasing month by month one twelfth of the last budget adopted by the Chamber, to which indexation is added. It ensures the continuity of State services and the payment of salaries and pensions of public service agents. The mechanism will end as soon as the new government is installed.
The federal trainer, Bart de Wever, promised, at the end of December, to accelerate the pace of negotiations between the parties involved in the formation of a new federal government. The end of January is cited as the deadline.
