Let’s go back to the list formation of 2019. Mercedes Van Volcem – partly due to a decision by party leader Vincent Van Quickenborne – must be satisfied with a place as the list pusher. Which she absolutely doesn’t like. She announces that she has given up on her national career and refuses the place. Only through an internal vote – in which Francesco Vanderjeugd from Staden gives up his ‘certain’ third place on the Flemish list – can the Bruges native be re-elected. Since then, relations with Q have been cool.
But after he ‘reconciled’ with CD&V in his own city, Van Quickenborne made a second ‘move’ in one day. By giving Mercedes Van Volcem second place on the parliamentary list in West Flanders, he heals an old wound and places a politician with a classical liberal profile at the top of his list. A tandem Kortrijk – Bruges also, that can work.
Van Volcem says that she always wanted to go to federal parliament. Her fellow citizen Jasper Pillen – until recently a federal member of parliament – is also on the Flemish list, which is also a good thing. “I stood up for the first time in 2003. Then I was also on the room list with the slogan ‘The Mercedes of the People’,” says Van Volcem. “As a young lawyer, I dreamed of becoming Minister of Justice,” she said in a press release about the most recent ministerial post that Van Quickenborne was allowed to occupy.