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“Roads are broken, the Justice department is going bankrupt and a power shortfall is feared. Belgium is a country full of problems”, sums up NRC Next as the country faces a major strike in different activity sectors and regions today and more national strikes are announced for the coming weeks.
Unions protest against Prime minister Charles Michel’s plan to cut government expenses and set retirement age to 67. His coalition partner, Bart de Wever of the Flemish nationalist party N-VA, thinks the country “needs to be changed”. “A bystander who reads a Belgian paper will not think it is strange the governement wants to take action”, considering the bad shape of public services and the fact there “is no more money” to fix it all. But, says a Belgian sociologist in the paper:
The interventions are too hard and too fast [for the Belgian population]. Shock therapy is the message of the government, but this is not understood.
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