Belgium now pays more to borrow than Greece. Its government still can't agree how to save €10 billion.

For most of the past fifteen years, Greece was the eurozone's cautionary tale and Belgium was the quiet, comfortable country where the cautionary tales were written. On Wednesday, the roles switched. Belgium's ten-year borrowing rate hit 4.41%, against 4.40% for Greece, according to the Belga news agency. The financial daily De Tijd says Belgium has not paid more than Greece since 2008.

A hundredth of a percentage point is not a crisis. It is a verdict. And on the same evening, Belgium's government met to decide how to respond to it and decided, after a few hours, that it could not.

Injury time, again

Bart De Wever's five-party "Arizona" coalition, named after the colours of its parties, is supposed to agree on about €10 billion in savings by 2029. Its top ministers, the prime minister and his five deputies, met on Tuesday night until after midnight, then again on Wednesday. "We established this evening that there is no agreement," the liberal deputy prime minister David Clarinval told reporters afterwards, according to The Brussels Times. Working groups will carry on through parliament's recess week. If there is no deal by the end of October, the state may have to run on "provisional twelfths", a monthly drip of spending authorised without a budget.

De Wever, a Flemish nationalist and trained historian with a taste for doom, had warned MPs that morning that the country was facing a "Wall of Darkness". "We are already in injury time," he said. "A debt crisis is the end of the world." His partners were not impressed. Frank Vandenbroucke, the socialist health minister, arrived saying, in a remark reported by La DH, that nobody would be reassured "with sloppy work, with one of these deals improvised at the last minute". One government source later said of him, according to The Brussels Times: "He ruined the meeting."

The numbers Greece would recognise

The official figures, published by Eurostat on the same Wednesday, explain why the markets have lost patience.

In 2025, Belgium ran a deficit of 5.2% of GDP, the third highest in the EU, behind only Romania and Poland and just ahead of France. Its debt rose to 108.1% of GDP. Its government spent 54.4% of everything the economy produced, up from 52.5% in 2022. Revenue, at 49.2%, barely moved. This is not a country that taxes too little.

Greece, the same table shows, ran a surplus of 2.0% of GDP last year. Its debt is still the highest in the EU at 145.4%, but in 2022 it was 177.8%. Greek public spending is 47.8% of GDP, almost seven points below Belgium's.

Athens did not get there by choice. It got there through three bailouts and years of cuts imposed by its creditors, with Brussels at the head of the table. The lesson the EU drew from Greece was that a eurozone country cannot spend what it does not earn for ever. The lesson does not seem to have travelled down the rue de la Loi, from the Commission's Berlaymont headquarters to the prime minister's office at number 16.

What €10 billion buys you in Belgium

Ten billion euros over several years is about 1.5% of Belgium's GDP. Greece cut far more, far faster, with far less. Yet look at what is on the table, according to the measures listed by La DH.

To spare taxpayers a general VAT rise, which the liberals of the MR vetoed, the prime minister wants to raise VAT on hotel and campsite stays from 12% to 21%; the MR objected to that too, so it may land on cinema and concert tickets instead. A doctor's visit could cost patients €5 to €10 rather than €1 to €4, one of a series of health measures that have Vooruit's Vandenbroucke up in arms. There would be a higher tax on the largest supplementary pensions, a freeze on the indexation of pensioners' holiday bonus, and, as a one-off, the sale of the state's BNP Paribas shares for about €4.5 billion.

Read that list again. The big structural item, Belgium's runaway spending on pensions, health and the rest of its welfare state, is being argued over in euros per GP visit. The biggest single number is a one-off asset sale that, by definition, can be done only once. De Wever himself told parliament that spending has risen by more than €60 billion since the start of the century, and that interest payments and pension costs are "the nooses that have been left for us". He is right. He just cannot get his coalition to loosen them.

Rules for thee

There is an awkward European subplot here. Belgium has been under the EU's excessive deficit procedure since 2024, and De Wever's stated aim is to bring the budget back into line with the European rules. That is a perfectly sensible goal. But Belgium hosts the Commission that enforces those rules, the Council that votes on them and the Parliament that lectures everyone else about them. If the country whose capital is a byword for fiscal supervision cannot meet the supervisors' standard, it says something about how hard Europe's fiscal discipline has ever really bitten on anyone who was not being bailed out.

Maxime Prévot, the centrist foreign minister, put it most honestly: "Belgium is now borrowing at a higher interest rate than Greece." Then he added: "Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of trying to be popular."

He is right as well. The question is whether his colleagues believe it. On the evidence of this week, Belgium's politicians would still rather argue about the price of a hotel night than about the size of the state. The bond market has already noticed. In 2010, it took Greece's politicians years to accept what the markets were telling them. Belgium has a chance to learn faster. It would be a novelty for a country so used to telling others what to do.