Every three years, the Municipal City Monitor is the instrument with which the Flemish government questions citizens about numerous local policy themes, ranging from poverty to housing and from traffic to diversity.
The proposal for foreign language questionnaires has already been given the green light by the Permanent Commission for Language Supervision. Still, Minister Somers is blocking the plans. He shares the criticism of a number of cities who had pointed to the “significant deviation from the standard rule for governments to communicate in Dutch”. “I understand this point of view. We must be careful with large-scale foreign-language communication from the Flemish government,” says Somers.
The Open VLD minister asks his administration to improve the representativeness of the survey in another way, for example by drafting the questions in “clear and accessible Dutch”. N-VA MP Nadia Sminate applauds the minister’s attitude. “Questions in other languages would not be in line with the ambitions of our integration policy and the coalition agreement,” says Sminate.
