The Redistributive Transformation of Fiscal Policy in Times of High Debt in Belgium (1912–2024): From Ability-to-Pay Taxation to Competitive Adjustment

This article examines how the redistributive design of crisis-time fiscal policy shaped Belgian federal public debt trajectories from 1912 to 2024. Drawing on a reconstructed debt-to-GDP series and historical–institutional analysis, it identifies a secular transformation in the distributive logic of fiscal adjustment. From 1912 to the late 1970s, broadly speaking, debt surges were addressed through explicitly progressive instruments grounded in the ability-to-pay principle, and on the view that capital should be taxed at least as heavily as labour. From the 1980s onward, this paradigm gave way to a competitiveness-oriented model that eroded tax progressivity, detached capital from the global tax base, and shifted the fiscal burden onto consumption and labour—disproportionately affecting middle-income earners. The evidence presented in this article points to three plausible determinants of this transformation: the role of mass warfare in legitimising progressive taxation; the ideological shift from Keynesian interventionism to supply-side orthodoxy; and the twin constraints of internal federalisation and external Europeanisation. Furthermore, the timing and modalities of these adjustments appear to have been significantly shaped by linguistic party fragmentation and the recurrent use of emergency executive powers—a pattern that was increasingly mirrored in the European Union’s own governance. Ultimately, since 2020, crisis management has relied almost exclusively on debt-financed expenditure. While the EU has temporarily acted as a redistributive counterweight to domestic fiscal paralysis, these ad hoc supranational interventions have left Belgium’s underlying debt trajectory unchanged.