Why Belgium’s World Cup moment isn’t bringing everyone together
Belgium can send the Red Devils onto a pitch and still struggle to get everyone singing from the same hymn sheet. That’s not because people in Brussels have forgotten how to watch football. It’s because the country is split in ways that make the usual national-team pep rally a little more complicated than the simple flag-waving version outsiders might expect.
Next up, the country is divided mainly between Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south, with a smaller German-speaking community tucked along the eastern edge. Those language lines aren’t just for road signs and subtitles. As far as I can tell, they run through everyday politics too. Flemish parties and Walloon parties largely live in separate arenas, answer to different voters, and fight different elections with different assumptions about what Belgium even is. A voter in Antwerp and a voter in Liège may both be Belgian, but they often move through different political conversations.
That separation matters because Belgium’s federal setup gives a lot of power to the regions and communities. The national government handles major files, yes, but plenty of the country’s practical business’s managed closer to home. That leaves the federal layer looking a bit thinner than in many other European states. It exists, obviously. It just doesn’t always feel like the only room where decisions are made. When the country reaches for a single national mood, it’s to do so across institutions that are already built for division.
In Belgium, a football shirt can unite a crowd for ninety minutes, but it can’t smooth over a political system built around language lines.
The result showed up plainly after the 2024 election. Forming a federal government took more than seven months, because no bloc came close to a majority and no obvious coalition could be stitched together quickly. That wasn’t a dramatic one-off. It was the familiar Belgian headache: lots of parties and little overlap as well as a whole lot of negotiation before anyone can even agree on who gets the office keys.
That kind of setup makes the usual “we’re all on the same team tonight” rhetoric harder to sell. In some countries, a big tournament lets leaders reach for easy symbolism and call it national unity. Belgium can try the same trick, of course, but the seams show faster here. Interesting. The anthem still plays, the crowd still roars, and the flags still wave (and yes, that matters). Yet behind the scenes, the country remains a place where political life is organized less around one common bloc than around several communities that keep their own scorecards.
So when the Red Devils arrive on the world stage, the emotional script looks familiar. Arguably, the actual politics beneath it, less so. That gap is where the story starts to get interesting, and where the prime minister’s own posture becomes harder to brush off as simple sports indifference.
Bart De Wever’s nationalism makes the silence louder
Also worth noting — bart De Wever’s spent most of his political life arguing that Flanders should run with a lot more room to breathe than Belgium currently allows. As leader of the New Flemish Alliance, or N-VA. He built his brand on Flemish autonomy, not on polished speeches about the joys of Belgian togetherness. That matters here, because a prime minister cheering for the Red Devils is never just a bit of harmless tournament theatre when the man in question’s made his name by pushing the other way.
His project has long pointed toward a looser confederal Belgium, where the regions take on even more power and the federal level shrinks to something leaner and less nosy. That’s a very different idea from the familiar nation-state script most leaders lean on during major sports events. In De Wever’s version of the country, Brussels isn’t the grand emotional center. It’s closer to a bargain that keeps getting renegotiated.
For Bart De Wever, a Belgian cheer carries paperwork. It arrives with years of arguments about who gets to define the country in the first place.
The awkwardness gets sharper because De Wever doesn’t stand alone in that nationalist corner. Vlaams Belang’s pushed the separatist line much farther, with less patience for compromise and a more open appetite for breaking the country apart. That party’s rise has shaped the whole Flemish right, even when N-VA tries to present itself as the respectable, governable version of Flemish nationalism. The result is a political space where Belgian symbols can feel suspicious by default. If you spend years telling voters that Flanders should have more say. It gets harder to suddenly drape yourself in black, yellow and red without looking as if you’ve wandered into someone else’s costume box.
That tension’s been part of De Wever’s political identity for so long that it now colors even the small stuff. A public cheer for the national team may seem trivial to people who treat football as an easy national ritual, the sort of thing governments can borrow for a weekend and then hand back on Monday. Yet for De Wever, the gesture isn’t neutral. It can read as an embrace of the very Belgian frame he has spent years complicating. A leader who built his career on Flemish identity can’t casually perform Belgian patriotism and expect the move to feel invisible.
The irony’s that the state machinery around him is still trying to do the usual World Cup thing. Belgium’s diplomatic service’s said its posts are working to help make the tournament feel festive, which is about as close as Brussels usually gets to a cheerful pep talk. At the same time, FIFA’s note on the squad named by Rudi Garcia and Romelu Lukaku makes clear that the football side has arguably already moved into the usual tournament rhythm. One part of the country is arguably preparing flags. Another part’s preparing talking points. Belgium, as ever, is doing more than one thing at once and pretending that counts as one mood.
That split’s what makes De Wever’s silence louder than the silence of, say, a leader with no nationalist baggage. He isn’t just a politician who happens to be lukewarm about football. He is the figurehead of a movement that has spent decades telling Flemish voters they don’t need to think of themselves first as Belgians. So when the Red Devils step onto the biggest stage in the sport, a public show of enthusiasm would ask him to inhabit a national identity he has often treated as provisional.
But the awkward part’s that he now occupies the top federal office, the one place where Belgian symbolism’s supposed to look natural. For many leaders, that job comes with a simple script: congratulate the team, wear the colors, smile for the cameras, repeat until the cameras go away. The script has a few too many lines he has spent his career deleting, for De Wever.
In that sense, his lack of enthusiasm isn’t a footnote. It’s a small but very telling piece of power and politics in Belgium, where even a football cheer can carry constitutional baggage (if we are being honest). And if that sounds faintly absurd, well, Belgium has never exactly made a habit of keeping its absurdities hidden.
He says he’s not a football guy, and means it
For all the political theater swirling around Belgium’s prime minister, the simplest explanation may be the least glamorous one: Bart De Wever just doesn’t seem especially interested in football. People around him have long described him as someone who doesn’t follow the game closely, and that matters here because the man isn’t trying to stage a fake burst of national passion for the cameras. In a country where the federal government is stitched together from several parties and language communities, that restraint can look calculated from a distance. Up close, though, it sounds a lot more like personality than strategy.
Sometimes the most honest public gesture is the one that never gets performed.
This means a Belgian official’s logic on the matter is fairly plain: if De Wever isn’t a fan, then pretending otherwise would read as fake rather than statesmanlike. That may sound almost too neat in an era when every public figure’s expected to clap on cue, along with wear the scarf and post a smiling message before kickoff. But it does fit De Wever’s own previous comments. He has said before that packed stadiums and the whole burst of mass fan frenzy do little for him emotionally. The noise, the flags, the group catharsis, all of it leaves him largely untouched. Not hostile. Just unmoved.
That’s a useful distinction, and it keeps this from turning into a lazy “he hates Belgium” storyline. Plenty of people admire the Red Devils without caring about every tournament. Plenty of politicians fake enthusiasm because that’s part of the job description. De Wever appears to be in the other camp, where the job still requires a public face but the face can only stretch so far. If you asked him to grin through a terrace full of chanting supporters, he might do it. He just wouldn’t fool anybody who has ever watched him talk about football.
From there, the contrast with his neighbors is hard to miss. Leaders in surrounding countries tend to have a far easier time turning national team support into a public ritual. French politicians regularly find a way to show up for Les Bleus when the tournament starts. Dutch leaders are no strangers to orange shirts and cheerful social media posts either. Interesting. Nobody expects those gestures to be deeply philosophical, and that’s part of the point. In much of Europe, backing the national side is one of those low-risk, high-visibility performances that politicians can do almost in their sleep.
Belgium’s prime minister, by contrast, seems to be working from a different script. The Red Devils’ official FIFA team page is there for anyone who wants the roster, along with the fixtures and the tournament framing. He apparently isn’t one of them. And that’s where the whole thing gets a little comic. The country’s waiting for a patriotic cheer; the man at the top is offering, at best, a shrug. Not as a tactic. Not as a coded insult. Just as someone who would rather watch something else.
Plus, that doesn’t make the silence less awkward in Belgium politics, where even an offhand comment can grow legs and wander into a late-night panel show. It only makes it more human. De Wever doesn’t seem to be playing the dutiful superfan and then quietly slipping out the side door. He seems to be standing in the doorway, saying, with all possible calm, that the match isn’t really his thing. Which, in its own way, may be more believable than any polished show of solidarity could have been.
The Red Devils have embarrassed his camp before
At the same time, that personal disinterest would be easier to wave away if Bart De Wever’s party had a spotless record with the Red Devils. It doesn’t. The awkwardness has surfaced before, and each time it has looked a little less like coincidence and a little more like a habit.
Back in 2015, Belgium had just climbed to the top of FIFA’s world rankings, which is the sort of moment that usually sends politicians reaching for their most painless smiles. Lawmakers in the federal parliament were arguably asked to applaud the achievement. Most did. The New Flemish Alliance didn’t, at least not in the same enthusiastic way as the rest of the chamber. That small refusal landed with unusual force because it came from the one big party that often treats Belgian symbols with caution. In a country where the anthem, the flag, and the team shirt are supposed to do some heavy lifting, staying seated can say quite a lot.
In Belgian politics, even a football cheer can turn into a test of where a party feels at home.
Because of this, the story didn’t stop there. During Euro 2016, a rumor spread that N-VA members had been told not to celebrate Belgium’s matches too loudly or too visibly. It was the kind of detail that sounds made up until people repeat it often enough that the party has to answer for it. N-VA later denied issuing any such instruction. Still, the denial itself tells part of the story. Nobody has to invent political tension around Flemish nationalism; it’s already sitting there, waiting for a football tournament to bump into it.
That tension can look petty from the outside. A chant in a stadium, a flag in a window, a quick photo op with a scarf around the neck. But symbols matter in Belgium, probably more than politicians would like to admit. When a party has spent years talking about autonomy, along with regional power and the limits of Belgian centralism, then even casual support for the national team can start to look like a statement with extra baggage. For N-VA, the problem isn’t the sport itself. It’s the national frame wrapped around it.
De Wever himself helped revive that feeling this year when he took aim at Belgium’s official tournament song because it had no Dutch-language lyrics. That complaint might sound like a minor culture-war gripe, the sort of thing people mutter into a coffee while the rest of the country rolls its eyes. Yet it fit neatly into the pattern. The criticism wasn’t about rhythm, melody, or whether the song could survive a karaoke night. It was about language, and language is never just language in Belgian politics. It’s a boundary marker, a reminder of who feels spoken to and who feels left out.
Moving on, for a party rooted in Flemish nationalism, that reaction is predictable enough. N-VA wants to be seen as serious and institutional as well as governing-minded, not as a protest movement with a grudge against national ceremonies. But the older instincts keep breaking through. A stadium celebration becomes too Belgian. And a parliamentary clap sounds optional, a tournament anthem feels skewed. None of these episodes is dramatic on its own. Put them together, though, and you get a party that keeps tripping over the same floorboard.
This is part of why De Wever’s silence around the Red Devils lands differently from a simple case of sporting indifference. It sits inside a longer pattern of hesitation around Belgian identity, especially when that identity arrives in a cheerful, mass-market form (to put it mildly). From what I gather, football’s supposed to soften the edges. For N-VA, it sometimes seems to sharpen them instead.
And that’s before the country even gets to the question of whether the team itself can serve as a common symbol when the people watching it don’t always share the same political story. The party may insist these are separate matters. In Belgium, that separation has never been especially tidy.
What a missing cheer says about Belgium’s identity problem
On top of that, sports are one of the easiest ways for a government to manufacture a shared mood. A tournament rolls around, ministers put on the scarf and the national anthem gets a little louder as well as suddenly a country that spends most of the year arguing about taxes, coalitions, and language rules is invited to pretend it speaks with one throat. That script works best when the symbols are already widely shared and the people using them don’t look as if they’re forcing it (and that’s no small thing).
A public cheer only lands when it sounds like belonging, not like a press release in fan gear.
New Zealand is a useful contrast. The haka’s woven into top-level rugby and, more broadly, into public life in a way that many New Zealanders treat as familiar rather than decorative. It still comes with debate. It always has. Who performs it and when it should be performed as well as what it means outside Māori communities aren’t settled questions. Even so, it’s become part of a national sporting habit that people recognise immediately. It lives inside schools, clubs, and stadiums, not just on television before a big match.
Belgium never quite built that sort of habit around the World Cup. Yes, along with the Red Devils can still draw crowds into pubs and public squares and yes, a decent tournament run gives the country a few days of cheerful chaos. But the top of government hasn’t turned football into a common civic script that everybody’s expected to recite in the same language. In a state split between Dutch-speaking Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia, and a smaller German-speaking community, that kind of gesture has always been awkward. A scarf looks simple, and the politics underneath it don’t.
That’s why Bart De Wever’s silence lands the way it does. Part of it’s plain enough to explain: he has never sounded like the sort of politician who waits all year for kick-off. Part of it’s harder to separate from his politics. A prime minister who spent years building his career around Flemish autonomy doesn’t suddenly become the face of an easy, uncomplicated Belgium because the World Cup is on. He can stay quiet and mean only that he isn’t much of a football fan. He can also stay quiet and remind everyone, without saying a word, that the country itself still hasn’t settled on one story.
Maybe that’s the real joke here, if you want to call it a joke. The stadium is full, the anthem is playing, the camera’s rolling, and the most powerful man in Belgium still looks like he’d rather be anywhere else. In a country that keeps negotiating its own identity in public, even a shrug becomes political noise.
