Belgian prime minister Charles Michel has been forced to hand in his notice after anger over the UN Migration Compact brought the country’s government down.
After four years in power, the left-liberal Reform Movement party leader offered his resignation to the Belgian monarch, King Philippe, on Tuesday night, after losing a vote of no confidence tabled by the Socialist Party and Greens.
Michel had urged lawmakers to back a minority administration following the collapse of his government earlier this month over his supporting the UN migration pact against the wishes of his ruling coalition’s biggest party — the right-leaning New Flemish Alliance (N-VA).
The 42-year-old lawyer’s decision to travel to Marrakesh last week and sign Belgium up to the UN Global Compact on Safe and Orderly Migration— which declares mass immigration to be “inevitable, desirable and necessary” — sparked huge protests in Brussels on Sunday.
Around 5,000 people took to the streets of the Belgian capital to protest Michel’s signing of the globalist agreement after the high court overturned a ban on the demonstration by local authorities.
Prior to the N-VA’s walkout from the coalition, the Flemish nationalist party had presented a list of 30 reasons to withdraw from the UN pact, including its failure to differentiate between illegal and legal migration flows, and questions over whether its “hate speech” provisions could have a chilling effect on objective journalism.
Breitbart London previously reported how pro-mass migration NGOs and left-wing politicians rejoiced at Michel’s replacing the right-wing N-VA immigration minister, Theo Francken, with liberal Maggie De Block, who earlier this week marked ‘International Day of the Migrant’ by announcing the creation of “about a hundred” extra places for asylum seekers.
Ahead of Belgian elections due to be held next May, a European History professor at Oxford University, Martin Conway, said that Michel’s resignation was indicative of many of the difficulties faced by “centrist” political figures in an age of rising populism.
“It’s clever, sensible, technical governance which is really under threat,” he told the New York Times, appearing to suggest that the previous open borders consensus was good government.