LETTER FROM BENELUX

The case was supposed to be settled through dialogue and an apology, according to a decision by the West Flanders public prosecutor's office. Conner Rousseau, then president of Vooruit, the Flemish Socialist party, therefore avoided a trial that would undoubtedly have punished him for remarks he had made about the Roma, in September 2023, during an evening of drinking. He referred to them as "brown men" whom only "the more frequent use of police batons" could force into "respect." This came as a surprise to the police in Sint-Niklaas, who were called in to quell the nighttime disturbance caused by the handsome hunk of Belgian politics.

Once the incident was made public, the man the press had dubbed "King Connah" became "Zatte Conner" – Conner the drunk – a generic name now applied to all those who can no longer control their words when drunk. Rousseau resigned as his party's president in November.

The ambitious young man – who became president of Vooruit at the age of 26 in 2019 and once answered "Why not?" when asked about the possibility of one day becoming head of government – was forced by the courts to visit a Holocaust memorial, undergo therapy to gauge the meaning of his words and engage in dialogue with the Roma community.

The problem is that Kham, the country's main Roma association, has decided to withdraw from the proceedings. It will not accept an apology as it does not know the full details of what Rousseau said on the night his career went off the rails. For the time being, the courts are refusing to release the full case file, and are not commenting on the possibility of a criminal trial, as the proposed mediation is clearly doomed to failure.

In any case, the incident reopened the question of the relationship between Belgian politicians and alcohol. It's a vast subject that the famous national sense of humor has always played down, despite the countless tragi-comic episodes involving leading politicians.

In August 2023, Théo Francken, a former secretary of state, was filmed urinating on a street in the center of Brussels. "I'm just a man, with gifts and faults; I work hard, those who don't like me can vote for someone else," he said to justify his behavior. As if echoing Rousseau's own words, he confessed: "I'm not a robot."

In September of the same year, the justice minister, Vincent Van Quickenborne, talked his way out of the now-famous "Pipigate": yes, some of his guests, who had been drinking a lot of beer, had indeed had fun urinating on – and into? – a police van parked outside his home. But what about him, seen gesticulating on a surveillance camera? He wasn't relieving himself but playing air guitar, swore the heavy metal fan. He was given the benefit of the doubt: the cameras were too far from the scene to distinguish between a musical performance and an episode of incontinence.

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