Belgium has many traditions, from creative potato dishes to cheerful “Ça va?” greetings, but none is as reliable as the nationwide strike. This post explores how calmly and humorously the country adapts each time public transport disappears, work slows down, and life enters its familiar rhythm of politely organised chaos.
A Short Field Guide to Belgium’s Most Reliable Tradition, The Strike
Belgium is a country of many traditions. Some are charming, like greeting people with a cheerful “Ça va?” even when nothing is remotely fine. Others are culinary, such as discovering that half the national dishes consist of mussels cooked in increasingly creative ways. But there is one tradition so deeply woven into Belgian life that you eventually stop questioning it and simply accept it as part of the landscape, the strike.
People abroad think Belgian strikes are chaotic. They are not. They are ritualised, structured, almost seasonal, a bit like the weather forecast, only more reliable.
If you live here long enough, you learn that strikes follow a kind of unspoken choreography. First, there is the announcement, not dramatic, just a press release from several unions who have finally agreed on something. Then comes the explanation, usually about budget cuts and pensions and “sociaal overleg” that apparently did not go very well. After that comes the timetable, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, sometimes all three, sometimes an experimental variant that seems designed to test the nation’s mood. It always feels strangely polite, as if someone is informing you of minor roadworks rather than a nationwide shutdown.
And the remarkable thing is that everyone adjusts, with a level of calm that should probably be studied scientifically.
Belgians simply look at the announcement, shrug, and start rearranging their week. People cycle more. Some work from home. Others stare at their calendar, sigh gently, and say, “It is what it is.” There is no panic, no outrage, no apocalyptic speeches. Just quiet resignation mixed with mild amusement, the Belgian emotional default setting.
What fascinates me most is how seamlessly strikes blend into daily life. On strike days, cities feel different, as if someone has turned the volume down a little. The streets are quieter, yet you sense a hum beneath the surface, a collective understanding that this is simply how things go. In some countries a nationwide strike would feel like a crisis. In Belgium, it feels like an unexpectedly long coffee break that everyone has silently agreed to take at the same time.
It helps that Belgians are natural improvisers. Trains not running? Take a bus. Buses not running? Take a tram. Trams mysteriously missing in action? Take a bicycle. Bicycles unusable because the rain is arriving horizontally and aggressively? Well, then you stand under a roof and wait, because the weather will change in seven minutes anyway. The country has survived far worse than a three-day shutdown. This is, after all, the birthplace of a political negotiation that lasted 541 days. A strike barely qualifies as a warm-up exercise.
Strikes also work as a national reminder that Belgium is, in reality, a very organised country that goes through life pretending not to be. The unions coordinate, the employers respond, the government issues warnings, the population adjusts alarm clocks, and everyone behaves as if this is a perfectly normal way to run a country. Even the disruption is planned, structured, and quietly predictable. That is Belgium’s hidden talent, even chaos is tidy.
And when it all ends, life snaps back with remarkable speed. Public transport reappears. Newspapers publish their traditional post-strike recap. Offices open their curtains and pretend nothing happened. The whole country returns to its routine of acting as if everything is simple and straightforward.
A country that can juggle three languages, two cultures, one capital city with eternal construction sites, six parliaments that somehow coexist, and a weather pattern that changes more often than the traffic lights can certainly handle a strike or two, or twelve.
So next week, when trains stall and trams vanish and offices operate on reduced enthusiasm, do not panic. Just treat it as another chapter in Belgium’s long tradition of structured unpredictability. Because here, you can count on two things, your transport might not show up, but the strike absolutely will.