The death has been announced of Jean-Luc Dehaene, a prime minister of
Belgium in the 1990s and a member of the European Parliament for ten
years. Dehaene, who had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, died in
France today (15 May) after a fall.

In June 1994, the Flemish
Christian Democrat almost became president of the European Commission in
succession to Jacques Delors, but his candidacy was vetoed by the
United Kingdom, which deemed him too federalist. Instead Jacques Santer,
the prime minister of Luxembourg, was appointed.

Dehaene was
prime minister of Belgium in 1992-99, succeeding Wilfred Martens as the
head of a coalition led by the centre-right. Belgium was in the midst
of substantial reforms – social, constitutional and fiscal.

The
Dehaene government improved the public finances, whilst preserving
Belgium’s social pact, which made him a plausible candidate to succeed
Jacques Delors as Commission president in 1994. Eleven out of twelve
member states backed Dehaene, but John Major, the British prime
minister, who was struggling to contain Euroscepticism in his own
Conservative party, vetoed him.

Dehaene was re-elected in 1995 as
prime minister of Belgium, and continued to push through difficult
budgetary reforms that prepared the country for eurozone membership,
which weakened the government’s popularity. Dehaene’s power-base was
Vilvoorde, a town on the northern edge of Brussels. In 1997 Renault
announced the closure of its assembly plant at Vilvoorde , with the lost
of 3,500 jobs – it was a symptom of the economic transformation that
was convulsing Europe at that time. The escape of Marc Dutroux, who was
awaiting trial for child kidnapping and murder, combined with a scandal
about dioxin contamination of food, condemned the CVP to defeat in the
1999 elections that brought Guy Verhofstadt to power at the head of a
liberal-led government.

In 2002 Dehaene was made a member of the
praesidium – the inner core – in the convention on the future of Europe,
that drafted the EU’s constitutional treaty. In 2004 he joined
the European Parliament as a member of the EPP group and was re-elected
in 2009. He drafted a report on the future financing of the EU, but was
more prominent in Belgian corporate life than in the Parliament. He
was a director of InBev, the brewing giant created from the merger of
InterBrew and AmBev. He was later chairman of Dexia, the Franco-Belgian
bank that became a victim of the Eurozone’s banking crisis and was
re-born as Belfius. He was mayor of Vilvoorde in 2000-07. Early in 2014
Dehaene was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he was not
seeking re-election as an MEP because of his health problems.

Elio
Di Rupo, Belgium’s prime minister said that Dehaene had “done great
service to Belgium, both economically and institutionally”.

Verhofstadt,
who is now president of the liberal ALDE group in the European
Parliament said: “This is a sad day for Belgium and Europe.”

Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, described Dehaene as “a convinced enthusiast for Europe and Belgium”.

José
Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, said Dehaene
had been a unifier: “His role as a mediator shone through in all of his
work.”