A simmering dispute inside Belgium’s seven-party governing coalition reached boiling point on 11 October when the core Cabinet again failed to agree on issuing study visas for 13 Palestinian students from Gaza who have won scholarships at Belgian universities. According to reporting by Belga news agency, Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot (Les Engagés) and Asylum & Migration Minister Anneleen Van Bossuyt (N-VA) had crafted a compromise that would allow the young scholars to enter Belgium in time for the autumn semester while preventing them from using their arrival as a springboard for asylum or family-reunification claims. The deal was blocked at the last minute by the Francophone liberal MR party, whose president Georges-Louis Bouchez reportedly insisted on linking the visas to tougher return measures for irregular migrants. Prévot publicly condemned the move as “blackmail” and “a human disgrace”, stressing that the students’ education should not become collateral damage in wider migration negotiations. The standoff forced the Cabinet to postpone a final decision and raised new doubts about the government’s ability to act on time-sensitive immigration files only months before federal elections. Under Belgian law, study visas for third-country nationals are normally processed by the Immigration Office after a positive recommendation from the Foreign Ministry. In practice, political sensitivities surrounding applicants from conflict zones can trigger ministerial scrutiny. Universities in Brussels, Ghent and Leuven have warned that missing the enrolment window would jeopardise the students’ scholarships and research funding. Academic groups and NGOs have urged the government to separate humanitarian study mobility from the polarised asylum debate. For employers and multinational companies operating in Belgium, the episode is a reminder that immigration files—even for highly qualified or grant-funded individuals—can be delayed by coalition infighting. HR teams are advised to build additional lead time into student-intern and researcher mobility cases and to monitor political signals that could slow approvals. Should the Cabinet fail to reach consensus in the coming days, the students may have to defer their programmes, and universities could look to neighbouring EU countries with faster visa channels.
Source: Anadolu Agency
