‘After Van Hool and Audi Brussels: does the manufacturing sector still have a future in Belgium?’

“In order to keep the industrial sector in the country, an industrial policy is needed – focusing on education, fast permits, cheap energy, competitive wage costs, etc.,” writes Knack editor Ewald Pironet.

At least 1,500 of the 2,400 people at bus manufacturer Van Hool in Koningshooikt will lose their jobs. The future of the Audi Brussels company, which employs 3,000 people, is shaky, because sales of its cars are not going as expected. No matter how different the Van Hool family business and the international Audi are, it seems certain that their future is not in Belgium. Van Hool will only produce its buses in Macedonia, Audi will move Q8 e-tron production to Mexico.

The stories of Van Hool and Audi Brussels show the decline of the car collection. Our country was strong in this. We had our own car manufacturers, such as Minerva, which was very popular outside our borders a hundred years ago.

Foreign car manufacturers stayed here after a law was passed that said that anyone who sells more than 250 cars here must establish an assembly company in our country. Ford, GM, Citroen, Renault, Peugeot, Volkswagen, Mercedes came quickly and in the golden sixties British Leyland, Simca, Daihatsu, Saab and many others followed.

That is in the past. The closure of Renault Vilvoorde (1997), Opel Antwerp (2010) and Ford Genk (2014) was a big blow. Between 1995 and 2022, almost half the jobs in Belgian car manufacturers were lost: from 68,600 jobs to 35,100. On top of this are job losses at Van Hool and possibly later at Audi Brussels. That leaves Volvo Ghent, which employs 7,000 people – making it the largest industrial employer in Flanders.

Economists have been warning for some time that the future of the auto industry in our country looks bleak. They consider job losses in the industry inevitable, because cars can be produced more cheaply elsewhere and because technological advances mean fewer workers are needed to assemble cars. Car assembly may be a thing of the past in our country, but will the entire manufacturing sector, where materials are processed into new products, follow the same path?

Prime Minister Alexander De Croo (Open VLD) is calling all governments together on Friday to see how Audi Brussels can still be helped. This is understandable two months before the election, but this does not solve the basic problem.

In order to keep the industrial sector in the country, an industrial policy is needed – focusing on education, fast permits, cheap energy, competitive wage costs, and so on. That is not the case now, on the contrary. Many parties, not only communists but also socialists and green people, consider industry to be polluting and a source of misery.

They do not realize enough that they are the source of our prosperity.