Paul Magnette, president of the PS, the most important French-speaking party in Belgium, surprised, on Monday February 7, by declaring to a Flemish magazine that he would like to see Belgium “get out of e-commerce”. The country, confided this leading official, who is also mayor of Charleroi (Wallonia), might therefore find “real shops and bustling cities” and would be able to defend “local businesses and small independents”.
Mr. Magnette, a university professor who became famous in Europe and beyond for the fight he orchestrated in 2019 once morest CETA, the proposed Euro-Canadian trade treaty, challenges the idea that e-commerce is progress : he would rather see “ecological and social regression”.
Hesitating between irony and anger, his political rivals – who are sometimes also his allies in the federal government and the regional majorities of Wallonia and Brussels – reacted strongly. “The 19the century cannot be a model of society (…), let us work for the world of tomorrow, with a place for everyone, instead of the archaic withdrawal”said Georges-Louis Bouchez, president of the Reform Movement (liberal).
Regulation rather than disappearance
Another partner of the PS at federal level, the Open VLD, the Flemish liberal party, believes that “going back to the economy of a hundred years ago will not help us”. Vooruit, the Flemish socialist party, stressed for its part the need not to repeal e-commerce but to fight unfair competition from foreign groups which threaten national trade. As for the Labor Party of Belgium (PTB, radical left), which has become the great rival of the PS in Wallonia, it seemed surprised and insisted on the importance of a sector which directly employs 11,000 people in Belgium, not counting indirect jobs. created in particular in logistics. While Mr. Magnette estimates that this sector essentially uses “a new proletariat”his opponents on the left and trade unionists instead point out that he is actually allowing unskilled people to find jobs.
Comeos, the trade and services federation, believes that a Belgium deprived of e-commerce but continuing to buy goods from abroad online would in any case lose “tens of thousands of jobs and 9 billion in turnover”. Other sources even speak of 12 billion and underline the threat posed by the development of mega logistics and distribution centers close to the Belgian borders, in the Netherlands and in Germany.
You have 42.95% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
