In June, the European Commission received a request from Brussels. The costs for the renovation of the central area that houses the European Union’s most important institutions, including the commission, were running over. With debt levels already dangerously high, the city was in desperate need of funds. To many readers, this might sound as if the European Union dispatched a request to itself.
Yet for inhabitants of the city — including me — the equation between the bloc and Brussels is anything but self-evident. Brussels, Belgium’s bilingual capital, is not just home to E.U. institutions, which employ around 50,000 people, usually in the same expat bubble. With a population of over 1.2 million, it also possesses its own large city government and has been, since 1989, one of the country’s three semiautonomous regions. For one of the most diverse cities in the world, around 45 percent of whose citizens are foreign born, this amounts to a decades-long experiment in self-rule.
That effort is now under serious strain. For over a year, Brussels has been without a working government. Signs of dysfunction — from rising homelessness to crumbling infrastructure — are accumulating, and a fiscal crisis not unlike New York City’s in the 1970s is on the horizon. Escalating drug violence has even led some to liken the city to crime-ridden Marseilles in France. Brussels, it seems, is nearing the end of its experiment in urban autonomy.
The significance of this eclipse goes beyond Belgium. As Western countries lurch further rightward, many liberals and progressives have cast their eyes on cities as potential fortresses against reaction. In Hungary the mayor of Budapest is a leading figure in the opposition to Viktor Orban’s regime, just as Warsaw’s mayor was the liberal standard-bearer in the recent presidential election in Poland.
In Italy, Bologna clings to its status as a haven of resistance against the right, firmly in power under Giorgia Meloni. And in the United States, alongside sanctuary cities defying President Trump’s immigration sweeps, Zohran Mamdani’s primary win in New York has rekindled hopes for sewer socialism as an antidote to Trumpism.
Brussels, which the philosopher Philippe Van Parijs has long celebrated as a paragon of cosmopolitan democracy, offers them an uneasy precedent. Mr. Van Parijs, who is from Brussels, regularly presents the capital as a political laboratory, tapping into older traditions of left-wing municipalism — from Red Vienna in the 1920s, which rebuilt the city out of the ashes of World War I, to London under Ken Livingstone’s leadership in the 1980s.
Brussels can hardly aspire to these standards. Yet it has put its relative autonomy within Belgium’s intricate federal structure to impressive use. It has developed a robust public transport system, which easily outdoes those of larger European cities, and has overseen a generous welfare state, even if that is mostly a federal achievement. Throughout, it has maintained an inclusive, pluralistic approach to governance. All of that is now under threat, compounded by a set of typically Belgian arrangements.
In a strangely decentralized system, the city is spread over 19 municipalities with their own mayors and bureaucracies. Over these towers a diffuse regional government, consisting of a coalition between Flemish and Francophone politicians elected on their own lists. They preside over a city that, though officially bilingual, has long been mostly Francophone in practice and in which French speakers were only recently reduced from a totality to a majority.
For decades, this baroquely complex arrangement appeared to work. Majorities were formed on both sides of the language divide, after which a coalition governed with the ministerial posts split between the groups. After elections in June 2024, however, the old rules broke down. The Francophone Socialists refused to work with Flemish nationalists, while French-speaking liberal politicians refused to rule with a new Muslim party.
The result has been deadlock. As the city’s credit rating worsens, it is an almost mathematical certainty that a future Brussels government will have to assent to an austerity program. Yet the Socialist Party, for one, is far from keen to push one through. The party, long dominant in the south of the country, had largely managed to resist the erosion of social-democratic parties across the continent. But it is losing members and electoral support at an alarming rate. Overseeing cuts to social spending is sure to seal its decline.
The unconsoling truth is that there are no quick fixes for the city’s deficit problem. Negotiations among parties to slash one billion euros in spending are underway. But real fiscal power lies beyond City Hall, in the federal government. There a coalition led by right-wing Flemish nationalists is undertaking a sweeping program of changes, including the capping of unemployment benefits, with the aim of deconstructing the country’s once mighty welfare state.
With the city’s drug violence worsening — over 20 shootings were recorded this summer — a nuclear option has come into view: a federal coup, in which the Brussels government is taken over by the national one. Ominously, Prime Minister Bart De Wever has derided the city as a “failed state” and hinted at an International Monetary Fund-like treatment. An effective takeover could take place through a constitutional loophole. If the city’s international role is deemed to be under threat, the federal government can act as a guardian of its budget.
For all its Belgian particularities, Brussels reveals a wider truth. In an era of stagnation and reaction, the appeal of municipal politics is palpable. Sidestepping the national government, lodged more and more firmly in the hands of the right, it offers a chance to take control and improve people’s lives closer to home. It helps, too, that there are some examples of success.
Yet Brussels offers an important lesson in political realism and the limits of urban power. Even in an age of globalization, national power will always constrain civic autonomy, a thorny task plagued by often intractable difficulties and disagreements. For those dreaming of better worlds in New York, Budapest or anywhere at all, the story of my native city is a sobering one.
Anton Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer. He is a lecturer in politics at Oxford University and the author of the forthcoming book “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post My City Is the Heart of Europe, and It’s Not Going Well appeared first on New York Times.
