Guy Verhofstadt
Guy Verhofstadt was prime minister of Belgium from July 1999 to March 2008, the Flemish liberal who had been called Baby Thatcher in the 1980s for his budget cuts as a thirty-two-year-old deputy prime minister and who came to the office at the head of the first government without the Christian Democrats since 1958, a rainbow coalition of liberals, socialists and greens formed after the dioxin scandal of 1999 had poisoned the chickens and the government. The nine years were the Belgian model of the early 2000s, with the budget balanced for the first time in fifty years and the debt cut from a hundred and fifteen per cent of output to eighty-four, the euro adopted. There were the same-sex marriage of 2003, the second country to have it, the euthanasia law of 2002, the cannabis decriminalised, and the nuclear phase-out legislated for 2025 and then postponed, the police reformed after the Dutroux affair. There were the Sabena airline's bankruptcy in 2001, the refusal to join the Iraq war and the chocolate summit of April 2003 with France, Germany and Luxembourg on a European defence headquarters that Washington mocked, and the universal jurisdiction law under which Belgian courts had taken complaints against Sharon and Bush and which the Americans made him repeal. There was the Belgian presidency of the Union in 2001 that produced the Laeken declaration and the convention that wrote the European constitution. He was born in Dendermonde in 1953, studied law at Ghent, led the Flemish liberal students, was the party's president at twenty-eight and deputy prime minister and budget minister at thirty-two under Martens. He lost two elections in the 1990s as the free-market ideologue and won the third as the man who had learned to smile. His governments' end was the election of June 2007 that the Flemish Christian Democrat Leterme won on the promise of state reform, after which the country went a hundred and ninety-four days without a government and he was brought back to lead an interim one for three months. He was blocked from the Commission presidency in 2004 by Blair and Berlusconi as too federalist. He went to the European Parliament in 2009 and led its liberal group for a decade. He was its Brexit coordinator from 2016 to 2020, telling the British what they had done in speeches the British quoted. He has written a dozen books arguing that only a United States of Europe can survive the century, which the European Parliament of 2024, in which he did not stand, has fewer members who believe.
- Lived: 1953 CE – ?
- Nationality: Belgian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
