BRUSSELS ― For decades, Belgium has been Europe’s beating heart. That its current prime minister fought against the EU ― and won ― ushers in a dramatic new chapter for the bloc.
Even though the EU agreed to send Ukraine €90 billion after 16 hours of marathon talks that ended Friday morning, this disguises yet more fracturing of European unity. Bart De Wever’s belligerence means it’s another victory for an anti-establishment leader.
The plan to use frozen Russian assets to pay for the loan, for so long the only idea under consideration, is in tatters. De Wever, the Flemish nationalist whose career has been based on wanting to tear his country apart, held out for more than two months. Even as late as Thursday afternoon, many EU governments believed he’d back down.
“He basically got everything he wanted,” one EU diplomat said after the summit broke up in the early hours of Friday morning.
Based on conversations with 23 EU officials, diplomats and politicians, nearly all of whom were granted anonymity so they could describe in detail the events of recent weeks, this is the story of how he did it.
It started during a mild night in October. That was the last time EU leaders met, and when they initially hoped they’d get a deal to take the unprecedented step of using Russian assets to give Ukraine financial support. The EU has got used to leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán throwing their weight around but, suddenly, the 54-year-old De Wever became the latest to break rank.
When leaders left that gathering shame-faced and empty-handed after promising Volodymyr Zelenskyy they were ready to send Kyiv billions of euros, they swore all they needed was two more months to win the Belgian over. Instead, as more time went on, more leaders took his side. What started to emerge was a populist bloc.
After near-daily meetings of EU ambassadors, dozens of phone calls, diplomacy dashes from Berlin to Brussels and amid a brutal Russian onslaught on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and civilian targets, two rival camps were still pulling in opposite directions by the morning of the summit on Thursday.
“Is Belgium alone? Is Belgium isolated? I cannot predict what will happen,” De Wever told Belgian lawmakers before taking the shortest of trips to his capital’s EU quarter. He knew it wasn’t.
The first camp of countries — by then led by Belgium with support from Italy, Bulgaria and Malta — opposed using Russia’s assets over fears of reprisals.
Instead they wanted the EU to borrow money jointly. The fact that this idea was unpalatable to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Hungary’s Russia-friendly Orbán and yet turned out to be exactly what happened, shows the scale of De Wever’s victory.
“Countries that live close to Russia … found it emotionally satisfying” to try to tap Russia’s frozen assets, De Wever told reporters after the summit. But “politics is not an emotional job,” and “rationality has prevailed.”
De Wever had been rewarded for his October stubbornness with unprecedented popularity at home and fawning attention from the EU’s big-hitters. By continuing to refuse to yield to pressure, he only made himself more popular.
In early December, the man who had spent his political career denigrating the French-speaking parts of Belgium, received several minutes of rousing applause after delivering a lecture to a Francophone audience.
Sixty-seven percent of Belgians polled the week of the summit said they backed his opposition to the frozen assets plan.
Earlier in the month, Germany’s Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wined and dined De Wever in Brussels, pulling out all the stops to convince him to drop his opposition to the frozen assets plan.
The two Germans got nowhere with the carrot. So some diplomats suggested a stick.
A week ago EU diplomats suggested that if Belgium didn’t come to the table on the frozen assets plan, it would be iced out of decision-making around the EU table, like Hungary has been over its rule-of-law backsliding.
Latvian Prime Minister Evika Siliņa told POLITICO on Tuesday: “For Belgium, I think I don’t wish them to become a second Hungary.”
But the warning did little to sway De Wever.
Neither did the threat of the EU circumventing Belgium to ram through the frozen assets deal with so-called qualified majority voting.
Less than 24 hours before the summit began, Belgium’s ambassador told peers during closed-door talks that “we’re going backward” on frozen assets. Yet most European leaders arrived for the high-stakes gathering still expecting it to materialize. It was still Plan A.
As they gathered in the Europa building rabbit-warren, the 27 EU leaders decided to rip up plans to discuss Ukraine funding first up and opted to leave them to the end, to give them time to convince De Wever.
The real action was happening in the rarefied backrooms, where EU leaders were discreetly huddling with their peers.
While his fellow leaders debated key issues such as enlargement and the bloc’s next multi-year budget, the Belgian PM and other key players, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Germany’s Merz, slipped out of the room. Merz met Meloni one-on-one to try to bring her round.
De Wever’s price for backing the asset plan: unlimited financial guarantees from his fellow member countries against the €210 billion package, in case Russia sued or retaliated in some other way.
But the idea of giving Belgium a blank check was a non-starter, with countries concerned about an unlimited liability to their bottom line.
After four hours of talks there was the real prospect of no deal.
The idea of using Russian assets for the loan unraveled shortly after a two-page legal document addressing Belgium’s concerns was circulated among leaders. For many leaders, it raised too many questions and went too far. Meloni quickly started picking holes in the document. French President Emmanuel Macron chimed in, followed by Luxembourg’s PM Luc Frieden.
With the clock ticking, leaders keen to get out of Brussels for their Christmas breaks and Ukraine waiting for certainty, talk turned to the European Commission’s Plan B for funding Ukraine: joint borrowing.
In truth, such an idea had been in the air for days. Von der Leyen had opened the door to eurobonds on Wednesday morning during a speech to the European Parliament.
“I proposed two different options for this upcoming European Council, one based on assets and one based on EU borrowing,” she said.
The question was how the EU could get Hungary, which had ruled out eurobonds, to lift its veto. Commission officials seemed confident that it had found a way.
In exchange for Orbán’s support, the Commission would spare Hungarian taxpayers from having to pay for Ukraine’s defense.
Orbán, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and Slovakia’s Robert Fico — the EU’s troika of Euroskeptic leaders — huddled for a private meeting on the sidelines of the summit before the leaders sat down to dinner.
They would all get carve-outs from the joint debt scheme in the end.
What united the other 24 EU leaders was that they agreed that failure at this December summit was not an option. Without money from the EU, Ukraine would go broke next year.
Zelenskyy, who jetted into Brussels on Thursday morning seeking to focus the leaders’ minds on the task ahead, told reporters after lunch that if they failed to get a deal, Ukraine would have to drastically cut spending. That would mean fewer weapons and drones and more casualties from Russian attacks.
Ultimately, the compromise deal means ― as is so often the case in EU decision-making ― pretty much every leader can sell it as a victory.
But no one as much as the Belgian prime minister.
The bad news for him is that in the EU’s corridors of power, that won’t be forgotten for a long time.
“Bart De Wever isn’t going to be getting any favors from the Commission any time soon,” a diplomat said. “And he will likely need them.”
