Alexander De Croo slips into La Belle Maraîchère looking more like a businessman taking a quick Monday lunch than a former prime minister who has spent the past week debating Europe’s current geopolitical quagmire.
He takes me slightly by surprise as I sit enjoying some rare February sunshine slipping through the lace curtains of this fish restaurant in Brussels’ Flemish quarter. This will be De Croo’s first interview since stepping down two weeks ago. Appearing relatively laid-back in an open-neck white shirt and navy suit, he looks, despite the dark times, as if he might really believe the optimistic title of his recent memoir: Why the Best Is Yet To Come.
The Flemish liberal even reflects brightly upon my broken leg (a skiing accident), which I am valiantly trying to hide beneath the tablecloth, professing that last year he was in the same resort as me but snowboarding. “A safer sport perhaps”, he laughs.
In need of a safer sport is certainly how Europe feels at the moment. Rightwing parties emboldened by the election of Donald Trump in the US are eyeing further electoral victories across the EU. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has been courted by the Trump administration, is on course to win the second-highest number of seats in German federal elections this weekend. The new Belgian government is itself led by a rightwing nationalist group.
Meanwhile, Trump himself has unleashed an aggressive policy of trade tariffs and threatened to take over Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. Last week, European governments were left reeling as Trump initiated bilateral peace talks with Russia, cutting Europe definitively out of negotiations.
De Croo is fresh from the Munich Security Conference, at which Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance, sparked outrage by taking aim at European efforts to prevent misinformation and accusing the bloc’s leaders of “running in fear of your own voters”.
The minute I raise the outlook for the continent, I suddenly feel that the prime ministerial side of De Croo has returned. “No one can underestimate the moment in which we are,” he says gravely. “There is quite a big risk that Europe is being redrawn and that we are not at the table. What I disagree with is that the European reaction up to now has been a chaos of anger, contesting and blaming.”
De Croo, fond of a quote, continues: “Someone once said ‘there’s only one way to manage your anger and that’s do your best and prove people wrong.’ I totally agree.”
Europe needs to put together a clear programme, he argues, fingers sketching on the beige tablecloth: “What we should do is to say, ‘OK this is the role we want to play, and we’re not going to accept that Europe is being redrawn without our being present, but this is how we do it’. That’s the proposal we come with, that’s the people we put around the table.”
The weighty politics is momentarily diffused by the return of the dickie-bowed waiter. The restaurant De Croo has chosen, whose name translates roughly as the “pretty market gardener”, is a stone’s throw from the headquarters of his liberal party, Open VLD, and has been frequented by the Belgian politician for years. He knows the owner and even brought Angela Merkel here when she did her farewell tour of Europe. He likes it because it is a “good restaurant”, not a “highbrow” one, and he loves fish.
After a short debate about whether the Belgian penchant for fish and frites is comparable to British fish and chips, De Croo makes a quick order in Flemish requesting the same for both of us: traditional shrimps croquettes and sole meunière.
We also agree on a half-bottle of Sancerre, despite De Croo insisting that he would normally drink beer with non-Belgians. “Our national product is beer and we should push it a bit more.” He flashes a tour guide smile and offers to send me recommendations.
At roughly the same time that we are mulling over fish options, a select group of European leaders are at a meeting in Paris organised by French President Emmanuel Macron for crisis talks on Ukraine and the continent’s future defence.
I wonder if De Croo already misses being part of the fray.
“That’s a double question,” he says with just a slight sigh. “The last almost five years as prime minister and 15 years in national politics, I enjoyed every moment of it. And yes the international part of it was something that I particularly enjoyed . . . But by definition it’s a temporary job.”
He says that António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, whom De Croo knows from his time as Belgium’s development minister, told him: “You’ll find out that being prime minister is nice but being former prime minister is much nicer.”
He pauses: “I have to say, over the past two weeks up to now, I agree.”
The waiter arrives with the Sancerre. He insists I take a picture of both sides of the bottle for FT readers’ benefit. “We’re being very exhaustive,” De Croo quips.
The son of Herman De Croo, a long-serving and popular Belgian minister, De Croo grew up determined not to follow his father into politics and instead set out in business. He studied business engineering in Brussels before completing an MBA at the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago and founded an intellectual property rights start up, Darts-ip.
Menu
La Belle Maraîchère
Place Sainte-Catherine 11a, 1000 Brussels
Shrimps croquettes x2 €48
Sole meunière x2 €90
Half a bottle of Sancerre €28
Sparkling water €6
Espressos x2 €12
Total (inc tax) €184
In a land of political dynasties (a study last year showed that about one in 10 Belgian MPs had parents in politics), De Croo said his father’s job was “one reason not to do it”. But after 10 years in the private sector, friends offered him an ultimatum after a few beers: “If you continue saying you’ll never do politics, then we want you to shut up [about it] or don’t stay on the sidelines.”
“That was a bit of an important moment,” he says.
He stood for election in European elections in 2009 and quickly rose up the ranks of Open VLD, the same party to which his father belonged. Entering government for the first time in 2012, he served in various ministerial roles including development minister and finance minister.
In 2020, despite his party coming seventh in national elections the previous year, he was called to try to form a government. The so-called Vivaldi coalition that he led took over at the height of the Covid pandemic in September 2020. That was followed by guiding Belgium through Europe’s energy crisis and galvanising support for Ukraine, in which Belgium has played an outsized role as home to Euroclear, guardian of €191bn of Russian frozen assets that have been used to guarantee a €45bn loan to Ukraine.
Luckily for De Croo, “I feel at ease under pressure”, he says.
We return to the pressure on Europe, which the former prime minister is determined should present an opportunity to Europeans rather than fill them with dread.
“We are with our back against the wall and that is actually the moment where often Europe makes gigantic strides forward . . . That’s been the case with Covid. It’s been the case with the energy crisis and the Ukraine war. That’s been the case when we had the financial crisis, that’s when as Europeans we go forward.”
One example is a sudden impetus behind efforts to turn around Europe’s slowing economy. He notes that thorny issues debated by EU ministers for many years, such as a capital markets union, now seem possible. Under pressure from businesses, recent moves by the European Commission to cut red tape are “quite remarkable”, he adds.
A champion of industrial policy during Belgium’s turn holding the rotating EU presidency last year, De Croo advises that the Commission needs to stop indulging in overzealous policymaking if Europe is to save its industry from its current “manic depression”.
Our croquettes arrive and the restaurant owner comes to check that his favourite customer is happy. De Croo tells me that you can squeeze lemon on them but he prefers without. I obediently follow his lead. They are steaming, unctuous and splurge all over the plate.
As I chase bits of shrimp around with a fork, we turn back to the new US administration.
De Croo has not met Trump but did have a chance encounter with Elon Musk, the US billionaire tasked by Trump with overseeing a radical regulation-slashing agenda.
The meeting happened in Musk’s hotel room in Stavanger, Norway, when the two happened to both be there for different reasons in 2022. Walking into the room, De Croo noticed 20 empty bottles of the Belgian lager Stella Artois on the side. “I said it looks like you had an interesting evening. And he smiled and I said, well, at least with a good beer.” Belgium does not have the vast industrial sites that would have interested Musk, so the two talked technology — De Croo is a self-confessed “nerd”.
“[Musk] is obviously a smart thinker and he has a tendency to just start from the white page, which is always an interesting perspective to have.”
Did you see indications of his turn towards radical rightwing politics then? “No”, De Croo says. You didn’t stay in touch? “No, we did not.”
Belgium will face a steep challenge to meet defence spending targets that will placate Musk’s boss, who wants EU countries to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence. The country currently hovers about 1.3 per cent, putting it near the bottom of the EU class.
De Croo seems relieved that this will be a task for the new government, but says that with the US turning from “America First” to “America Only” under Trump, it is “quite clear that as Europeans we are on our own”. At least the debate over European countries providing security guarantees to Ukraine and putting boots on the ground has “matured”, he notes. “A lot of European leaders say, OK, we’re ready to do it. And I think we should.”
He adds that bringing the UK into the defence discussion is a good way to open the door to deeper co-operation with the EU’s erstwhile member. “You can have big ambitions and big lofty goals, but you need a step forward and this is a very tangible and timely one.”
The plates are cleared, along with some untouched bread, and our sole arrives dripping in butter. I ask De Croo to take me back to the night of June 9 when he himself became a casualty of a voter swing to rightwing, anti-immigrant parties.
The outcome left the 49-year-old liberal in caretaker mode for 236 days until a new five-party coalition led by his Flemish nationalist rival Bart De Wever was agreed two hours before a midnight deadline on January 31.
De Wever is a separatist, pushing for greater autonomy for Belgium’s Flemish-speaking half.
I say that moving to Belgium for the first time, I had been surprised to learn that there was even a debate about the country splitting in two. De Croo instantly closes it down: “Separatism? It’s not a debate. No one wants to split up the country . . . It has been very often in political debates what serves if you don’t want to discuss the real issues.”
He compares the current state of play to Belgian surrealist art. “We have a federal country that is now being led by a nationalist politician who has a core belief that he wants to split up the country but who in his government programme has nothing on that topic . . . That shows the resilience of the democracy we have.”
But, I ask as we start to disentangle the fish from its bones, why are liberals like him being squeezed out of government nearly everywhere across Europe. Do centrist parties refuse to play dirty?
“One of the things in the political debates we lost is that adversaries on the conservative side and on the populist and nationalist side were successful in projecting an image that we were not busy with the core things that people care about, the purchasing power, the living in the cities and so on,” he observes.
“I think we were working on that, but populism is extremely good at finding small examples, blowing them up and saying, ‘Look, this is what is happening’. If you say that is dirty politics, yes, we haven’t quite figured out how to do that.”
In that case, will liberals survive the next few years?
De Croo, as ever, is optimistic but says that it is incumbent on liberals to communicate better. “One of the things we need to explain is that democracy is complicated,” he says. “Life is not a Disney movie where you say something and in the end, everyone smiles and everything is solved.”
The waiter arrives to whip away the plates. De Croo, lamenting our failed attempt to get through the frites, asks if I want pudding but we stick to espressos and keep the plates of chips just in case.
We return to Merkel, whose retirement from politics in 2021 has left a lingering vacuum among the EU’s 27 leaders, De Croo says. During summits there would come a point where Merkel would “right her back and all of us knew, OK now she’s going to talk . . . and from there she was extremely powerful”.
He also has a begrudging respect for Hungary’s self-styled “illiberal” leader Viktor Orbán, who sat next to De Croo around the council table. “He has a logical reasoning. It’s not mine and I would disagree on many, many things but it’s interesting to understand his logic.”
Asked whether Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s far-right prime minister, could act as a European conduit to Trump, De Croo says that Italy is one of the “main” European countries so it is “not new” that Rome should play a role.
It’s not clear yet what De Croo’s next step will be. For the moment he has swapped the European Council table for politics closer to home, becoming mayor of his hometown Brakel.
He is also mulling using the experience he had as development minister to work more with sub-Saharan Africa. If relations with the US have “to be put in the freezer for a few years”, he says, partnerships with the rest of the world will only matter more.
So, I wonder as we drain our coffees, should we still be hopeful that the best is yet to come?
“You had that up your sleeve,” he groans. “There is so much that is necessary and there is so much that is possible”, he says, noting that we have not managed to touch on the “gigantic opportunity” of artificial intelligence during our two-hour lunch. “Definitely I believe the best is yet to come . . . it will maybe be a bit harder [but] it’s not because it’s hard that we shouldn’t do it.”
Alice Hancock is the FT’s EU correspondent
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