‘A catastrophic situation’: Belgium’s new security chief launches crusade against Brussels drug crime

BRUSSELS — Bernard Quintin, a career diplomat and proud Bruxellois, has taken on a daunting task: fixing the city’s epidemic of drug violence.

The seasoned negotiator has spent 20 years moving between postings, from Rio de Janeiro and Burundi to Warsaw and the EU’s diplomatic arm on Schuman Square in Brussels. But after a last-minute appointment earlier this year — which took even him by surprise — Quintin is now Belgium’s minister for security and home affairs.

Quintin’s challenge is to implement police reform and curb gang crime. It promises to be an uphill effort: The minister must contend with gaping budgetary holes, deeply rooted distrust of federal overreach into city matters, the region’s extended political paralysis, and local politicians who hate the idea.

Brussels is “in a catastrophic situation,” Quintin told POLITICO in his corner office on Rue de la Loi.

A Brussels native, the minister praised his city as combining the culture of a metropolis with the zen of a provincial town. But he lambasted its dirty and clogged streets, its budgetary problems and crime —  and the fact that, nearly a year after an election, Brussels still doesn’t have a regional government.

“I think it’s a scandal,” said Quintin, a member of the French-speaking center-right Reformist Movement (MR), Brussels’ largest party in the June 2024 Belgian federal election.

The city is “on the verge of bankruptcy, if not bankrupt already,” and its security problems have become “extremely acute,” the minister said.

A mere 48 hours after he was sworn in as minister in February, Quintin had to rush to the scene of a shooting. Heavily armed men had opened fire at Brussels’ Clemenceau metro station — the first of several successive firearm incidents in the area.

Gun violence in the Belgian capital is on an upward curve. In 2024, 9 people were killed in a total of 90 shootings, landing Brussels among the top three European cities in terms of gun violence along with Marseille and Naples.

The coordination of police forces and their ability to quickly intervene must be “fundamentally improved” to reverse the trend, Quintin said.

Forcing reform on Brussels

But the city’s politicians hate the Belgian government’s plan to make that happen.

Brussels is one of three Belgian regions, which oversee matters like transport and economic policy. On Belgium’s political scene, the bilingual but largely French-speaking region of Brussels is squeezed between Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south. 

In a bid to bolster Brussels’ splintered police, the national government led by Bart De Wever of the Flemish-nationalist N-VA has decided to merge Brussels’ six police forces into a single entity.

In Brussels, however, local politicians fear that will alienate the police from the city’s residents and say the problem is actually a shortfall in resources.

Some have labeled the merger idea as a Flemish-nationalist pet project that the government is pushing through against the will of Brussels. The accusation risks bringing the familiar and often paralyzing divisions between Belgium’s language groups into the debate.

Quintin is well aware of the political minefield, and says it’s all the more reason to act quickly: He plans to send his proposal to parliament by Belgium’s national day, July 21, and merge the police forces in 2027.

Brussels is the only large Belgian city to have several police forces, and the minister says that “anomaly” needs correcting. “The coordination issue, which arises every time something happens in Brussels, wouldn’t come up anymore.”

In an apparent nod to the concerns of mayors, the minister has underlined the need for the police to remain embedded in Brussels’ various communes. He is also reviewing the financing of police zones and has proposed to transfer some of their debt to the federal level.

“Consultation is in my DNA,” Quintin said. “After my career, it would be a shame if nothing had stuck.”

Educate, explain, prevent — and punish

Drug trafficking must be fought throughout the value chain, the minister added, from the people who produce and traffic the drugs, often from well beyond Belgium’s borders, to the sellers and users.

“I’m exaggerating, of course, but currently we’re almost in a situation where a guy comes in, unfolds his little chair, and sets up his little table and his parasol,” he said.

Authorities should use what he called “VIP — very irritating police” — to uproot complacent dealers and hit the profit margins of traffickers. But users should be penalized more as well, the minister said.

“If you buy marijuana, if you buy cocaine, if you buy heroin, you’re a part of that chain and you bear part of the responsibility … We have to educate, explain and prevent. But at some point we have to punish too,” he said.

Meanwhile, Brussels’ 11-month political void hasn’t helped matters. “The absence of a full-fledged government that can make decisions is a problem,” Quintin said.

Stalled attempts to forge a Brussels regional government, and the gaping hole in the capital’s budget, are increasingly drawing ire from political leaders.

Earlier this month, PM De Wever told RTL that if Brussels turned to the federal government to ask for more money to pay off its debt, he’d “act like the [International Monetary Fund] and impose strong conditions to reorganize.”

The comments unleashed a storm of criticism in Brussels. Ahmed Laaouej, the leader of the Brussels chapter of the French-speaking socialist PS party, said they were the words of “a nationalist and separatist leader” who treats the Constitution as if it were a “paper rag.”

As a Brussels local and a member of the government, the former diplomat is caught in the middle.

Quintin said he doesn’t believe Brussels is fairly financed, but added that it’s “obvious” the federal level wouldn’t agree to funnel Belgian taxpayer funds into a “bottomless pit” without demanding that things be “put in order.” 

However, the minister added, a scenario where Flanders and Wallonia governed Brussels together would amount to the “negation of Brussels as a region in its own right” — which, as a politician with deep roots in the capital, he would oppose “regardless of the position of other members of the government, or even within my party.”

“I’m neither Flemish nor Wallonian, I’m Bruxellois. I was born in Brussels, my parents were born in Brussels … It’s the city I return to, to take a breath after years abroad,” he said.