Bart De Wever, the mayor of the Belgian city of Antwerp and chairman of the Flemish right-wing political party N-VA, claimed that “Belgium has the highest public expenditure and the highest structural deficit of the EU.” EUfactcheck looked into this claim and the source it was based on, and found out that the statement made…
Jarosław Kaczyński, former prime minister of Poland and current chairman of the leading government national-conservative party (PiS), caused a public outcry on social media and broke the news by stating Poland’s low birth rate is caused by women’s alcohol consumption. Kaczyński mentioned he was “joking a bit” but his statement spread like wildfire, increasing his…
Aleksandar Vulin, Serbia’s former minister of internal affairs and founder of the political party Movement of Socialists, partly blames the European Union for the escalating situation in Kosovo, which is connected to Kosovo’s decision to change the license plate policy. This claim turns out to be false. Serbian newspaper Novosti quotes Vulin’s claim, made on…
In the first national election debate, broadcasted by RTL4, leaders of political parties in the Netherlands were asked to take a stance on several important issues. One of the statements, about climate change was: “In order to achieve the climate goals the Netherlands must build new nuclear power plants”. Conservative parties such as the VVD (liberal party), the PVV (nationalist party)…
Rain or Shine. Copyright Noah Moeys, 2021
“Only four per cent of Dutch nature reserves are in good condition. The number of wild animals has halved since 1990,” states Dutch political party D66 in its election programme for 2021. With these statements, D66 tries to convince Dutch citizens to support the party in the upcoming national elections. D66 promises to create more…
Dutch political party VVD states in its current election programme (2021) that the Netherlands has one of the largest social rental sectors in Europe but that the waiting lists for social housing average nine years. The party promises to make social housing more available to people with smaller incomes by stimulating richer people to move…
On March 26th, Jon Stone, a policy correspondent at The Independent UK wrote a series of tweets in which he claimed that select normal EU unemployment benefits are similar to what the UK is doing for those who cannot work due to the COVID-19 crisis. “One thing I think many British people may not understand…
Dutch politicians are regularly seen in late night talk shows, especially during the corona crisis. In the Dutch talk show ‘Op1’ party leader Rob Jetten from the social-liberal party D66 took part in a discussion and tried to explain how important the proposed Merkel-Macron Corona virus relief agreement is for the EU and the Netherlands.…
Since the beginning of the corona virus crisis many theories on how to stop, slow down or cure the virus have emerged. Last month there were more than 60,000 cases in France and some studies on some patients has made a lot of noise especially in the press. The debate was opened in France following…