What the EU must do to compete—and become the leader the world needs

Preroll: PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the big and complex problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Intro (Alexander De Croo): Let’s get to a system where we say to the world, young people who want to study in Europe, you can get a permit to study in Europe. That means that you can stay a few years later to start your career, but afterwards you need to go back. And new people coming in can only come in when the other ones come back. And it’s putting it in a very mechanical way. It’s one of the things that we can offer to the world, is the quality of our education system. But in a continent where the demography is moving in the opposite direction, it’s important for us to have young talent coming in, and to show that we’re still open to the world. And that may be the overarching element. As Europeans, we need to remain open to the world. More strict on our own interest, and sometimes draw a red line when we think that it’s going too far, but we are the number one trading bloc in the world. We are the number one investor in fighting climate change. We’re the number one investor in development cooperation. We’re the number one investor in diplomacy. It’s time we start acting like the number one and not like the number two.

Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Hi. It’s Ralph Ranalli. Welcome back to PolicyCast. Alexander De Croo has been Belgium’s prime minister since October of 2020. It’s a relatively small country, with about 12 million inhabitants—slightly less than the city of Los Angeles—but it’s very much the face of Europe with the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and NATO all calling Brussels home. Prime Minister De Croo, who saw the country through the COVID pandemic, says that the geopolitical and economic upheavals already being instigated by the “America first” ethos of President Donald Trump will present another stiff test for the leadership of not only his country but the EU. He also says the key to Europe not just surviving that challenge but also thriving will depend on its ability to raise its level of economic competitiveness significantly in the coming decades. While still a powerful trading bloc, the EU’s economic growth has been slowing since the year 2000 and it’s an also-ran to the US and China in the vital tech sector, with only four of the world’s top 50 tech companies being based in Europe. It’s also facing the challenge of long-term demographic trends—by 2040 the EU’s workforce is projected to shrink by 2 million workers a year. As the US retreats from global leadership on fronts ranging from the green energy transition to human rights, De Croo says Europe must make urgent economic policy changes to maintain both its values and its status a leader on the world stage. He joins me now to talk about it.  

Ralph Ranalli: Prime Minister de Croo, welcome to PolicyCast.  

Alexander De Croo: Thank you. Thank you for having me.  

Ralph Ranalli: So I’d like to start with your personal story, if we could, because you have an interesting background. You were a businessman and an entrepreneur, and you earned your MBA at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University here in the United States. And when you were elected to head your party, Open VLD, in 2009, you didn’t really have much of any political experience. Can you talk about your journey into political life, and what inspired you to become involved in politics?

Alexander De Croo: Sure. I always consider that the fact that I did not have a lot of political background that that’s one of my main advantages. And so my political party, Open VLD, is what we would call a liberal party. It’s a liberal party in the European sense, in the way that it is a party that is very much pro-business, pro-free-market, but kind of progressive also on the ethical dimensions.  

Fair to say, I come from a political family. My father has been a member of parliament for more than 50 years. So, in US terms, a congress member. And so, I always stayed away from politics my whole youth, but it was there. I spent 10-15 years in the private sector, and at some point, I had a good conversation with some really good friends who told me: “You know, you always say you don’t want to do anything in politics. But when we have a beer, you talk about nothing else.” And their whole point was, you know, you always say how things should be better. You always say how society, how government could be organized better. If you want to talk about this, you need to do something about it. If you don’t want to do something about it, if you want to stand on the sideline, then you shut up. And that kind of made me think, well, maybe I have a bit of a head start, maybe I should use it. And so that was the start of that journey. I participated in the first election really not with the intent of being elected, and I was not elected. And then afterwards within my party there were internal elections, and I used every opportunity to take it.  

And then it really went in a straight line the last 15 years. I was president of my party. I’ve been almost eight years vice prime minister in coalition governments. Belgium are always coalition governments, between four to seven parties sometimes, and the last four years I was prime minister. I never expected to have that, but don’t regret a second of that journey because it comes back to the start. Instead of standing at the sideline and complaining and saying how things can be better, the question is what can you do? And that to me is the basis of why I have been doing politics.  

Ralph Ranalli: Right. Ask what you can do is actually one of our key slogans here at the Kennedy School.  

Alexander De Croo: Okay, well that fits well.  

Ralph Ranalli: It comes from John F. Kennedy, who said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Well, I was going to ask you if you had any regrets, and you actually answered the question before I could even ask it. So let’s turn to European competitiveness. That’s why you’ve come to the Kennedy School to talk. Last September, we saw the Draghi report, written by Mario Draghi, the economist and former Italian prime minister, on the future of European competitiveness. The backdrop to this is slowing European growth since 2000. And on a per capita basis, real disposable income has grown only about half as much in the EU as it has in the US. What were some of the reasons for that disparity in economic growth?

Alexander De Croo: There are quite a few. To me, one of the key ones that is really, really at the core, is the lack of a common European capital market. That, to me, is one of the main differences between the United States and Europe is that, bluntly said, in the United States, you come up with a project which has only a 20 percent probability of being successful. You will find private capital for that, because the capital market is so sophisticated. In Europe, you will not be financed by the private capital market. What then happens is that very often governments say, well, one way or another, these types of things need to happen. So public finance steps in, but public finance then needs to be de- risked. And then it gets blurred away, and actually the project is not being realized.  

That’s not because we have a lack of capital in Europe. We have actually quite a lot of capital. The savings rate is actually quite high. So what we see is that a big chunk of the capital that we have, the pensions and funds that we have, invest in U. S. private equity funds or any other investment instruments, who actually then, with our money, come in Europe and start financing our companies, and often move them to the United States. So to me, this is one big chunk. And that’s the European Capital Market Union. I was finance minister seven years ago. And I was part of those negotiations. And those negotiations, we were already saying, well, it’s been ten years that we have been talking about it. So that really is a difficult one, but I hope that now that we have our back against the wall, we really start to get moving on that.  

Another dimension is that we are proud of our single market and our single market is an incredible achievement. And especially countries like Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, those are the countries that that are benefiting a lot from that. It is incomplete. And I take an example, Belgium is very strong in biotech, for example. I know a lot of Belgium biotech firms who when they go to market, their go- to market will be in the United States and then it will be in Japan and maybe then it will be in Europe. And why are they not doing it in Europe is, just to get their reimbursement or market introduction, they have to file 27 different files with different criteria throughout Europe. So besides the fact that our innovation is being leveraged with U. S. capital, which in fact is actually European capital, the society benefit, of for example the introduction of pharmaceuticals, is going first on other sides of the, of the world. So, this is not just to say that Europe is wrong and nothing is right in Europe. Europe is incomplete. And that, to me, is really the synthesis of an excellent report that Mario Draghi has written.  

Ralph Ranalli: Right. One other thing Draghi said was that no one was really hitting the panic button until very recently. There were some positive trends, like European exporters finding markets in Asia, thanks to multilateral trade rules. More women were entering the workplace, so labor contribution to growth went up. And unemployment went down after the financial crisis. Did those positive factors give European economic leaders a false sense of security, do you think?  

Alexander De Croo: Yeah, I think so. But saying that, well, one could say the last two weeks that really the alarm went off. And, I mean, in, in, in two weeks, so many things have happened.  

Ralph Ranalli: Right. I definitely talk about that in a minute.  

Alexander De Croo: But the alarm has been going off for a few years. And we’ve been hitting the snooze button very often and saying like: “Well, you know, we’ll get there. We’ll get there.” Now we are with our back against the wall. And very often Europe moves forward when we have our back against the wall. And when you had the financial crisis, a lot of things happened at that moment. And remember how Greece was seen as the black sheep of the European constellation. Today, Greece is actually quite a powerful economy. So that transformation can happen. And COVID enabled us to go forward on a domain, which is purely national sovereignty, which is healthcare. And we achieve things, and in energy, the same is happening.  

What is different now, of course, is that our lack of competitiveness is really visible. And it’s visible because of big geopolitical shifts that happens outside of our control. But today we see that on the input prices, being it energy or being it rare materials. Or we have problems of availability. Or we have problems of prices. Capital markets I talked about. Internal market which is not fully fledged. Dependencies, which are difficult. Dependency on Russia for energy, dependency on the United States for our security, dependency on China for semiconductors. A lot of those things make us actually quite vulnerable. And if you then have on the other side of the Atlantic a president who says: “Well, when I see vulnerabilities, I’m actually going to exploit them.” Then the alarm is going off and we need to act.

Ralph Ranalli: Yeah. One big takeaway from the Draghi report was that Europe has a need for rising growth, if it’s going to continue to be strong and maintain its values. And by 2040, the workforce is projected to shrink by close to 2 million workers each year. And he said, we’re going to have to bring up productivity...

Alexander De Croo: Yeah.  

Ralph Ranalli: ...in order to compensate for that. How do you bring up productivity in this I guess you could call them unprecedented levels that he’s talking about being necessary. He said Europe needed a radical change.

Alexander De Croo: Yeah.  

Ralph Ranalli: What sort of radical changes are there and can there be to have that necessary rise in productivity?  

Alexander De Croo: Well, one of it is how do we look at technology and how do we look at innovation? And in general, Europe has been looking at technological innovation with more fear than with, than with hope or perspective. For example, related to the AI discussion, I mean, if you just look at demographics, and you’ve explained demographics, our labor supply is going to shrink. Quite dramatically, actually. So, introducing technology that enables those scarce labor resources that we have to be working on where really their value added is and, and less on routine things, we should see it as a, as a big benefit. But at the same time, we have regulation on AI that makes it actually quite, quite hard.

And so we have a tendency in Europe to do policy by regulation and policy by reporting. Finally, this is now being crystallized that this is not the way forward. And what do we need to do as public authorities? We need to be clear on what the objective is. What’s the goal? On climate change and other dimensions. But then, on how to achieve that goal, we need to be open minded. We need to say: “Look, you can do it wherever you want. We need to have space for innovation.” That’s not how Europe works today. Today, Europe will say, this is the goal. And we’re also going to tell you how you need to do it. That destroys innovation. So that’s one domain. It’s just clearing the objective, much more open minded on, you know, you do trial and error, you come up with innovation, and that will boost our industry.  

The second domain is organizing migration. And like many places in the world, migration is a delicate topic. It’s high on the political, on the political agenda. We will need a certain form of migration. By the way, the countries of origin will need it as well. And we need to find a way to organize it in a much more structural way where young people come study in Europe, spend a few years there, and then come back and bring back the knowledge that they have. That enables us to leverage their knowledge and the talent that they have, but also develop, for example, sub–Saharan African countries. That’s important for us.

I believe in the transatlantic relationship, and I think the transatlantic relationship is there to stay. But the world is bigger than just the United States and Europe. And that is why, for example, when Europe makes a trade deal with Mercosur countries, with the Latin American countries, that’s crucial for us. We need to get more of those agreements with Sub Saharan African countries as well. And that’s another way of how we can boost our growth. and our productivity.

Ralph Ranalli: There are several professors here who are working on various aspects of industrial policy. And I know industrial policy has been something that you’ve talked about. Particularly in the climate realm, where they’re saying, look, there are win-win situations here between the developed world and the developing world, where that’s more than just exploiting their resources. Is that something that you think could be an advantage for Europe if Europe decides to really pursue that?  

Alexander De Croo: Yeah, I think so, and we do it. And what we need to do as Europe is to combine things that make economic sense with geopolitical interests. When you can make those fit together, and this is the world of today. Every economy today, every industry today is more geopolitical than ever. One example is the agreement we made on migration with Egypt. And so with Egypt, we’ve made an agreement on stopping irregular migration at the borders and being sure that people that are being sent back because they are not entitled to international protection, protection that they’re being taken. But at the same time, investing in, for example, solar and hydrogen production, investing in their local economy. That’s the type of agreements that we need to make. We have an interest on organizing migration, and especially irregular migration. They have an interest in developing their economy. At the same time, we have an interest in having access to green hydrogen. That’s the type of agreements that we need to make. Some people will say it’s transactional, it’s very economics focused. But you know, when you have a country like Egypt, with more than a hundred million inhabitants, with a young population that has needs, helping them to boost their own economy is one of the best things that we can do. I’ve always considered that if, as Europeans, we want to live In prosperity and if we want to live in prosperity and if we want to, to live in a safe environment, you need to make sure that your backyard is actually in peace and that means investing in our backyard.  

Ralph Ranalli: Right. The arguments about necessary and rational focuses on migration are they’re well-reasoned, they’re supported by factual research. Yet they are facing the headwinds of an incredible amount of noise, of populist political noise. We’re facing that here in the United States. Very much so. There are reports out of California of citrus crops rotting on the trees because they’re all the farm workers who’ve been the backbone of the California citrus industry for generations are afraid to show up for work now. And Europe seems to be making a decisive turn to the right. Including in Belgium, with the last election, which is why you’re now a caretaker, prime minister, which I hope you don’t mind that term.  

Alexander De Croo: No, no, that’s reality.  

Ralph Ranalli: So the New Flemish Alliance in Belgium won the most seats in the 2024 election. Your coalition, which was called the Vivaldi coalition, which just as an aside I think is a great nickname, our listeners can Google it if they want. But you still won 76 seats, your coalition in total, which should, which nominally would be enough to have a majority in the parliament. But, the top two parties were the new Flemish alliance and the Flemish Interest Party. What do you think is going to happen? Last time it took, you formed a government, it took something like almost 500 days. Belgian politics is incredibly complicated. What do you think is gonna happen in terms of the next government of Belgium and how it’s going to balance all these competing interests. Is the Flemish interest party going to be allowed into the government? They were, they were sort of pariahs and and kept to the sidelines. What, what do you think is gonna happen?  

Alexander De Croo: So, first of all, we are a federal country, and often federal countries have their strengths in being decentralized, but often have their difficulties as well. That’s the case in Germany. The Netherlands is also a country with coalition government. But let’s not underestimate the results that we achieve. I mean, this is one of the richest countries in the world, with an income disparity that which is one of the lowest in the world with a very wealthy population. In any ranking on innovation, Belgium is in the top five in Europe. So you have a country that is actually quite strong on social and economic aspects. Forming a government sometimes has been long. It looks like in the next days, a government actually will be formed in Belgium, which has a different composition than the one that I has been leading.  

Now, the one I have been leading started in a very specific circumstance. This was full in COVID. We were at that point really not doing well. We had at that point, an American president who is now president again, who was saying Belgium is the hellhole of the world. And we had really a lot of problems in our hospitals. We managed that. And we managed the country through the COVID crisis, through the Ukraine crisis, through the energy crisis. That now we have a different government with a different composition because the task at hand is different. That’s quite logical. But what we do see in Belgium, that it takes time to form coalition governments, we see that actually happening throughout Europe. And you could almost say it’s a trend. A lot of the national governments in Europe are actually quite weakened. The situation in France is complicated, the situation in the Netherlands is complicated, Germany is going through elections. My feeling is that it’s a temporary thing, but it’s also a bit a sign of the times. Forming a coalition means that you need to make a   that is good for the whole population.  

But that is hard in times where political speeches are reduced to maximum 15 second sound bites, where a lot of it happens on Twitter or X. Politicians are trying to find their way in a new environment. That’s not only in Belgium. What you call Flemish interest, which is our extreme right party, they will not be part of government, that’s an agreement that has been respected in Belgium for a long time. And, I hope that that new government now will, will be able to work in full effect. But really, I would invite you... Besides what people call complexity, you have a country that is a trilingual country that has never had any violence between different groups of population. Again, that is one of the most prosperous countries that is an incredible international place, and the European Union is there and the European Commission and NATO and so many international organizations. We’ve been quite successful on that domain.  

Politics has sometimes been extremely successful. Sometimes it has its problems, but that’s maybe something we also need to explain. Democracy is not always easy. Sometimes democracy takes some time. And when you have tough discussions, that’s because your population actually has opinions which are often quite divergent. There is a tendency now to be very critical on democracy when it takes some time. You know, we see countries where things are much simpler, meaning in autocracy, it’s way simpler. The outcome of the election is very often known in advance, but those are very often countries that are light years away of the level of living that you have been able to establish. Sorry for doing some, some commercial on my country, but I’m actually quite proud of my country.  

Ralph Ranalli: No, Belgium is a fascinating place and a very excellent national football team as well.  

Alexander De Croo: That, that I agree, though, we were at our top in 2018 when we ended third in the World Cup, and that was in Russia. We’ve been going down for some time, but there’s a new generation ready, so I’m very hopeful.  

Ralph Ranalli: So getting back to the European turn to the right, we have six EU countries, Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, and the Czech Republic now have fully right-wing governments. Right wing parties now have increased influence in Sweden, the Netherlands, France, even Germany. We’ve seen some rather disturbing endorsements of the far-right German party coming out of the United States, particularly from Elon Musk. What are the consequences for European competitiveness if this right-wing trend continues.  

Alexander De Croo: Look, the fact that within Europe you have shifts, being it to the left or to the right, that’s normal. And you have 27 countries and sort of balance of power shifts. And you feel that in European council, the prime ministers and head of state sit together. Yes. The discussion shifts. And it’s good that the discussion shifts when the sentiment of the population is shifting. What you see is that, indeed, the topic of competitiveness is high on the agenda now, but this is something that, for example, Belgium and my government has been doing for years. In the last two years, we have been doing everything to get competitiveness high on the agenda. What is important is that we achieve that competitiveness. But keep what we have on what I would call the Green Deal. And the Green Deal are our climate objectives. I’m convinced that keeping that goal but creating more flexibility and more freedom in achieving that goal is the way for us to achieve, is a part of the way for us to achieve long term technological leadership.

Drill, baby, drill. It sounds well. It might sound attractive on the short term, but in the long term, that’s not how you build competitiveness. You build competitiveness by leading in offshore wind, by leading in hydrogen, by leading in battery technology and so on. That’s difficult and we see that our industry is struggling. But if European Commission in the next month comes with a package which enables us abundant access to energy and lowering prices of energy, and that will take some time, but concrete actions will come that further harmonizes our market to really have the full potential of more than 400 million European inhabitants creates the single capital market where I talked about. And then in the short term, there’s some decisive actions on cutting red tape and reporting and so on. We are taking the right steps to be competitive in the longer run. And I think it would be a gigantic mistake if we would move away from our climate objectives. It would be a mistake for humanity, but it would also, from a competitiveness perspective, be a big mistake. You talked about industrial policy. One of the key elements of industrial policy is taking a direction and then sticking to that direction. I mean, if industrial policy means that with every election you start shifting around, then you’re probably better off not doing any industrial policy at all.

Ralph Ranalli: So we’ve sort of obliquely touched on the new United States administration, so let’s just go there. In terms of reactions, personally for me I would say, words like disorienting come to mind, among others, but what has been, your reaction, the reaction in Belgium and maybe elsewhere around Europe?

Alexander De Croo: What is happening should not be that big of a surprise. I mean, we, we’ve seen what happened in Trump one. Obviously, he and his administration had more time to prepare this time. I think what is important for us is, first of all, as Europeans, we should not let ourselves being pushed in a reactive mode. Every day there’s tweets, there’s statements and so on. First thing we need to do is filter what you react on and what are you not reacting on. I mean, if you want to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, fine by me. These are things we shouldn’t react of. And so let’s be very careful and not being pushed in a reactive way.

Certain things we should also acknowledge. I mean, the American administration talks a lot about the trade deficit. Now we need to be clear on the trade deficit. The trade deficit is indeed, there is a negative trade balance on goods. Not on services. On services, actually, it’s quite positive. But we understand that there is an issue on the United States sides on the trade deficit with goods. First of all, it shows that Europe is competitive. I mean, if we would not be competitive, there would not be a surplus on the European side.  

Right. But again, to come back to what I said before, linking economics and geopolitics. OK, if this is an issue, we geopolitically want to disconnect from Russian gas. OK, we can buy more LNG in the United States. That helps us on disconnecting faster from Russian gas, and it helps the Americans on the issue of trade imbalances. And that’s the logic that we need to find. People say it’s going to be more transactional. That means that it is more interest based, so it means that we need to understand what are our interests and then start, start to trade one with another as well.  

I would also not forget that the power of the transatlantic relationship has also been because of values. I mean, we believe in democracy, we believe in the rule of law, and we need to show it. I mean, we were always the beacon for the world in that dimension, and it has given us so much influence. If we throw that away, we’re going to be losing a big part of the benefit of that. Let’s see at some point if we can realign on that dimension. And let’s avoid entering into a trade war. I mean, the easiest way around the trade war is us just more buying in the United States. That’s much cheaper than having a trade war. Having a trade war between the United States and Europe. I mean, China will say this is a big party, this is exactly what they wanted. So we need to try to get in that conversation. I’m actually quite hopeful on that, but it means that as Europeans, we need to avoid getting dragged into an agenda being set by the U. S. administration. We have to set our own agenda.  

Ralph Ranalli: It was interesting that you mentioned European values because I was wondering, as a European, do you think you realize the extent to which other people around the world in other countries who share Europe’s stated core values, prosperity, equity, freedom, peace, and democracy in a sustainable environment? Do you have a sense now that people are looking to you in other countries as sort of the standard bearer now, that their sort of hopes are sort of turning to you?  

Alexander De Croo: I think yes, but what we need to avoid as Europeans is to be the ones that walk around the world with our finger up and thinking that we can lecture the world on what’s going to happen. We need to get away from that. I mean, we need to work in partnerships. We need to be much more flexible in those partnerships. For example, with African countries, we need to be very clear and say: “Look, we have interest to work with you because of your minerals and because of certain trade. But we know that you need investment in sustainable energy and so on. So let’s be a bit more transactional there as well. And play on what our strength is. Our strength is, yes, we believe in human values and we believe in democracy and so on. And we have more stability to offer than, for example, China, in those relationships.  

But that means that as Europeans, you need to make sure that we don’t have different standards for different situations. In Ukraine, we’ve said respect of international law, respect of sovereignty, respect of the integrity of a country. That’s the reason why we help Ukraine, and we’ve been able to be very united on that. When we see what is happening in the Middle East, there we see also that international law is not being respected, that UN resolutions are not being respected on both sides. But then we need to be as strict there as we have been in Ukraine. And, and there is some criticism by the Global South on the fact that they have the perception that we’re not using the same standards. I don’t think all that criticism is 100 percent correct, but there is some truth in that. And it’s important- and we all know how complicated international politics can be- but it’s important if you want to be the beacon in those domains that you act in a standardized way in different occasions.  

Ralph Ranalli: So this is the time in PolicyCast where we come to policy and we ask our guests for policy recommendations. You’ve already mentioned a few things, like the need for a unified capital market. If you were in charge of the policy levers for a day, what would the two or three top priority policies you would implement in order to help Europe achieve that growth that’s necessary that Mario Draghi says we have to achieve this growth if we want to maintain who we are and what our values are?

Alexander De Croo: Okay, so these are short term measures. First of all, we need to get rid with a big part of what I call policy by reporting that we have in Europe. It is called CSRD, it is called taxonomy, it’s all those reporting systems that we think is going to change the behavior of our business environment, and that’s not the case at all. It’s just leading to more recruitment in the reporting department, but it’s not solving everything, anything. And that is something that can give a signal on the short term to our business community that actually we mean it and we will come with something. That’s the first thing.

Second thing, on migration, is a system of what I would call circlular migration. Let’s get to a system where we say to the world, young people who want to study in Europe, you can get a permit to study in Europe. That means that you can stay a few years later to start your career, but afterwards you need to go back. And new people coming in can only come in when the other ones come back. And it’s putting it in a very mechanical way. It’s one of the things that we can offer to the world, is the quality of our education system. But in a continent where the demography is moving in the opposite direction, it’s important for us to have young talent coming in, and to show that we’re still open to the world.  

And that may be the overarching element. As Europeans, we need to remain open to the world. More strict on our own interest, sometimes draw a red line when we think that it’s going too far. But we are the number one trading bloc in the world. We are the number one investor in fighting climate change. We’re the number one investor in development cooperation. We’re the number one investor in diplomacy. It’s time we start acting like the number one and not like the number two.

Ralph Ranalli: Well, Mr. Prime Minister, thank you so much for being here. I know you’ve really raised my level of understanding about both the challenges facing Europe and Europe’s importance, in the world going forward. And I hope that, that our listeners feel the same way. So thank you very much. I really appreciate being here.  

Alexander De Croo: Thank you for having me. And this was a great discussion.  

Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. One programming note: As we were conducting our interview, a coalition of five parties, which will be led by the Flemish separatist party the New Flemish Alliance and does not include Alexander De Croo’s center-right Open VLD party, agreed to form a new government, effectively ending his tenure as prime minister. The country’s far-right party, Vlaams Belang, was excluded from the new governing coalition despite winning the second most seats in last year’s election.  

Mr. De Croo’s visit to the Kennedy School was hosted by the Harvard Institute of Politics, which has worked to inspiring public service, civic engagement, and leadership among Harvard’s students for more than 50 years. If you’d like to see recordings of recent IOP events in the John F. Kennedy Forum or see a list of upcoming speakers, please visit the institute online at iop.harvard.edu. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please join me for our next episode when Professor Archon Fung of HKS and Professor Larry Lessig of Harvard Law School be in our studio talking about what it means that American oligarchs are stepping into the spotlight at the start of the second Trump administration. And don’t forget to subscribe to PolicyCast on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app, so you don’t miss any of our other important upcoming episodes. And please leave us a review while you’re there. So, until next time, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.