Conner Rousseau will continue to live in Sint-Niklaas and will not move to Ghent for the 2024 elections | Inland

Will it be Sint-Niklaas, his hometown where his mother was once mayor, or Ghent, his beloved student city and old socialist bastion? For a year and a half, the rumor mill was running at full speed about the place where Vooruit chairman Conner Rousseau would settle in the run-up to the municipal elections of 2024. The bullet is now through the church: he will remain in Sint-Niklaas. He announced that himself today. There he will compete with the current city council. N-VA member Lieven Dehandschieter currently wears the sash there and rules together with Groen and Open Vld.

With Sint-Niklaas, Rousseau opts for the ‘safer’ option. In Ghent he would have to compete with liberal mayor Mathias De Clercq and green first alderman Filip Watteeuw. In 2018, the socialists still went to the polls together with the Greens, but Vooruit became the ‘little brother’ of the two. If this marriage of convenience were to survive in 2024, Rousseau would have to give Watteeuw first place on the list. Moreover, since the autumn there have been persistent rumors that mayor De Clercq is working on a Ghent city list, with CD&V and Vooruit. Even then Rousseau could ‘only’ become second man. Now that he remains in Sint-Niklaas, there seems to be a greater chance that the city list will actually be there.

Add to that the fact that it would be a personal defeat if Rousseau gets a lot fewer preferential votes than De Clercq or Watteeuw. It is in any case a political risk to move for electoral considerations. Just think of the fiasco of Kris Peeters (CD&V) in Antwerp. The big difference is that Rousseau does have a deep bond with Ghent: he studied there and worked for Vooruit leader Freya Van Den Bossche.