Last month, the streets of Brussels were painted red, green, and blue. In a major protest on October 14, 140,000 workers heeded the call of Belgium’s three trade union confederations — socialist, Christian, and liberal — to demonstrate against the right-wing government’s cuts to wages, pensions, and public services. It was the country’s biggest demonstration in the twenty-first century.
This was also the twelfth mass mobilization since the government, dubbed “Arizona” for the colors of the coalition’s parties, came to power after the 2024 elections. It showed that the Belgian workers’ movement — despite structural economic shifts and decades of neoliberal attacks — has the power to mobilize masses of workers to defend social rights, living standards, and fair taxation. Since the start of 2025, Belgium’s militant unions have increasingly escalated their mobilizations, including a thirty-thousand-strong teachers’ strike in January, a hundred-thousand-strong central demonstration in Brussels in February, a general strike in March, multiple regional and sectoral actions ahead of the summer, and the central 140,000-strong demonstration in October.
This will now be followed by another historic escalation: from Monday to Wednesday of this week, the labor movement will extend its habitual one-day actions to a three-day strike as the political dynamic heads toward a showdown before Christmas. A transport strike on Monday will expand to a public services strike on Tuesday, culminating in a general strike on Wednesday with pickets across the whole country.
Until now, neither the government nor the unions have backed down — also because the stakes couldn’t be higher. Fundamentally, the government is attempting to restructure the still-strong Belgian social model that unions have won and defended over the past century. With the mobilizations this year, the unions have managed to paralyze parts of the government’s agenda, demonstrating that…
Auteur: Daniel Kopp
