On the set of LN24, the new Secretary of State for the Budget explained the objective of her assignment: “Working to reduce the budget deficit because it is too big”.
“But then how big is the deficit?” Martin Buxant asked. “The figures are very bad (…) If we look at the Belgian state deficit as a whole, it amounts to 5.9% of GDP,” explained Bertrand.
“And if you express it in money?” Buxant kept asking. The secretary of state, who has replaced Eva De Bleeker since mid-November, has not been able to answer, even after much insistence. “I can’t tell you not to make a mistake, but I’ll check,” he said.
Sander Loones (N-VA), who had previously spotted errors in the budget, shared the relevant snippet on Twitter.
And the reaction of Raoul Hedebouw, president of the PVDA-PTB, was not long in coming. “Liberals have dug so deep into the national debt in recent years that they have no idea how many billions the budget is short,” he wrote.
Bertrand, later questioned by ‘La Libre’, spoke of tiredness: “I woke up at 4 in the morning, after nine hours in the Commission. I doubted the correctness of the figure at the time, so I didn’t want to make a mistake, I suppose. But as soon as I left the studio, I gave Martin Buxant the exact figure: 33.6 billion euros. I’m human…”
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