Paul Magnette, the president of the Socialist Party, was the guest of the Bel RTL morning show. Questioned by Fabrice Grosfilley, he clarified the positions of the PS concerning the measures to be adopted to reduce the energy bills of households and businesses.
A new select ministerial committee (kern) energy took place this Tuesday evening to study support measures intended to reduce energy bills, both for businesses and households.
The Socialist Party pleads for a price freeze. “We have been asking for it for months and we see that little by little the lines are moving”says Paul Magnette.
Do we expect it to be done at European level? “In terms of electricity, we can do it here in Belgium. We have the means to do it and we must do it. If Europe does not decide it, we must decide it ourselves”.
“We must set electricity prices, we must stop letting the market, which has gone completely crazy, which no longer meets any common sense rule, set prices that are delusional”.
How to set prices?
Regarding gas, the president of the PS agrees that it is complicated: “because Belgium is not a gas or oil producer. We also don’t have big oil companies, like the French, the English or the Dutch. It really has to be Europe that blocks the gas prices. Europe must tell the gas-producing countries: we will not buy at a higher price than the one at which you sell to the Chinese or the Indians, for example. This would already make it possible to lower gas prices very considerably and therefore also the prices of electricity made from gas”.
For electricity, Paul Magnette explains that in Belgium, “it is produced for the rest with nuclear and renewable. And there, we can perfectly set the prices”. He also argues that when he was Minister of Energy, a dozen years ago, he had implemented a tax on nuclear rent. “It already brings in 700 million euros today, so we already tax the excess profits in Belgium. But we have to tax them much more. There are companies that make totally indecent profits. It’s like the excess profits of war , it’s totally immoral. We must recover them, we are already recovering half of them thanks to the tax that I had put in place. We must go and find another 700 million, a billion and return this money to citizens, to individuals, to the workers who today cannot pay their bills”.
A reduced rate, alongside the social rate
Thanks to this recovered money, the socialist party also wants to set up an average price. “We already protect 20% of households who have the social tariff. It is a very reduced tariff, three to four times lower than the commercial tariff. Between the social tariff for the poorest people and the commercial tariff that the most rich can pay normally, we need a reduced rate, capped for all the others, for the workers who today are not making it”.
Who might be affected by this reduced rate? It is under discussion within the government. “For us, it’s regarding two-thirds of the population who are no longer coping”. If income is taken into account, it will be, for example, the people who receive “around the median wage” (more or less 3,300 euros gross).
The president of the socialist party believes that these aid measures must be implemented by the end of October, before heating consumption becomes very significant.
