The proportion of Dutch-speaking police officers in Brussels has fallen to less than half of the workforce.
Over 96% of the 6,706 police officers in the Brussels-Capital Region speak French, while 3,305 (49%) are competent in Dutch, according to data collected on 1 January 2024. Knowledge of Dutch has therefore fallen by 6% since 2021.
Minister for Home Affairs Annelies Verlinden (CD&V) revealed this information when it was requested by Vlaams Belang parliamentary group leader Barbara Pas.
The figures show that the number of bilingual officers in the capital has declined steadily since 2012. Until 2009, 70% of Brussels officers were proficient in both Dutch and French, but the number has been decreasing ever since, falling to 45.6% today.
Pas says that French-speaking education in Brussels is to blame for this linguistic imbalance. She added that Verlinden and her predecessor Jan Jambon (N-VA) had "buried their heads in the sand" in reaction to the issue.
Credit: Belga / Nicolas Maeterlinck
Language features high on the list of priorities for Flemish nationalists. 28% of students across secondary schools in Flanders do not speak Dutch at home, something that the right-wing N-VA party sees as a problem to overcome.
In January, Flemish Education minister Ben Weyts (N-VA) proposed that Dutch be the only language permitted to be spoken on school grounds, which provoked criticism from the education sector due to the effect this would have on children's identities.
Regarding migration, the same political party is determined to encourage integration through language. The latest initiative, 'Dutch as a second language' (or NT2) aims to promote cultural values alongside language learning. "The sooner you start learning Dutch, the sooner you will be successful with us," Weyts explained when NT2 was announced in January.
Language argument is 'annoying and disproportionate'
In Brussels, the police force is not the first sector to come under fire for linguistic disparities. Taxi drivers at Brussels Airport went on strike late last year in protest of the Flemish Region’s insistence on mandating all drivers operating from the airport to pass a B1 level Dutch exam by 1 July 2024.
The airport is located in Zaventem – therefore on Flemish territory – but many drivers come from French-speaking Brussels. If the bar were raised from A1 to B2 it could result in thousands of job losses, protestors argued at the time.
Pro-Francophone party DéFI's leader François De Smet supported the strike, criticising an "annoying and disproportionate" initiative pushed forward by a nationalist agenda. DéFI was originally known as the Democratic Front of Francophones.
