Before the elections of 2024, a concrete plan must be on the table to definitively abolish the Senate. That is the ambition of current Senate President Stephanie D’Hose (Open VLD).
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Plans to abolish the Senate regularly pop up in the Wetstraat. But in The newspapaer it is Stephanie D’Hose, the Senate president himself, who is now advocating abolition. She says her experience as chairman has taught her that the institution is of little use anymore. D’Hose has been chairman for a year and a half.
Before the elections of 2024, a concrete plan must be on the table to definitively abolish the Senate, she said in an interview with her chairman Egbert Lachaert. From the end of February, she wants to install a separate Senate committee that prepares that plan.
– D’Hose photo: belga
For Open VLD chairman Lachaert, the most important thing is that the Senate ceases to exist as a separate political institution. “That costs taxpayers 40 million euros per year, while the Senate has hardly any added value,” he says.
There has been a consensus among the other Flemish parties for some time that the Senate no longer has a future, the liberals say.
The coalition agreement includes a short passage about the Senate in the section ‘political innovation’.
The agreement literally says: ‘In order to deepen this first series of reforms, a dynamic will be started in the Chamber of Representatives, involving citizens, the academic world and society. The purpose of this process is to explore how the Constitution and legislation can be modernized to promote democracy.’ One of the topics that must then be discussed is precisely the survival of the Senate.
Great sensitivity are the more than 150 staff members that the Senate still has (10 years ago it was twice as many). ‘Very good and passionate people work here’, says D’Hose. ‘They must retain a place in the future federal parliament or the associated institutions. I have already discussed this with my colleague from the House, Eliane Tillieux (PS). She wants to contribute to that.’
Since the foundation of Belgium, our country has had a bicameral system, with the Senate for a long time acting as the highest meeting where all legislation was finally approved after an initial passage in the Chamber of Representatives. The institution has lost a lot of weight and relevance in recent decades. The 2011 state reform reduced the Senate to a reflection chamber with sixty members. Fifty come from the state parliaments, ten of them co-opted by the political parties. Today, only these co-opted persons receive compensation for their membership of the Senate.
Incidentally, abolition is primarily a political gesture and not so much a saving. Three quarters of the 40 million euros that the Senate costs annually goes to the maintenance of the building and that building will of course continue to exist. Another large part of the cost is the wages of the staff – which are not just thrown out on the street.
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