What’s Permitted for Me is Forbidden for You

In the name of efficiency and meritocracy the Flemish nationalist N-VA (New Flemish Alliance) want to impose a strict mold on academic life. Students who fail to graduate within the designated number of years risk losing their enrollment and financial support. The message is clear: failure is unacceptable, doubt is a waste of time.

But when we look at the academic records of N-VA’s own leading figures, things get awkward. Several of them benefitted from exactly what they now want to deny others: time, space, and second chances.

Bart De Wever, the current Prime Minister of Belgium, began studying law, switched to history, and took about three extra years to graduate. Ben Weyts, now Minister of Finance and Budget, spent nine years drifting through political science. Matthias Diependaele, the Minister-President of Flanders, took eight years to complete a five-year law degree at KU Leuven. Zuhal Demir, now serving as Minister of Education, leads the push for stricter timelines.

And that’s where the hypocrisy lies. Authoritarian and right-wing politicians have no trouble imposing rules as long as they don’t apply to themselves. They preach discipline and order, but forget their own detours. They cut social benefits, as long as their own parliamentary salaries and pensions remain untouched. They praise the nuclear family, while divorcing, remarrying, or raising children in ways they morally condemn in others.

This pattern isn’t accidental, it’s doctrinal. They see their own success as earned and universally valid, while others’ struggles are framed as weakness or abuse. They deeply distrust personal freedom, unless it’s their own. The perpetual student is not the problem, they are the symbol of what these politicians despise: uncertainty, evolving identity, the right to wander, to deviate.

The irony, of course, is that a university should be precisely the place where detours, depth, and even failure are possible. Education as a phase of life, not a conveyor belt. The hypocrisy of politicians who once breathed that freedom but now want to cut off the oxygen for others is not just cynical, it reveals something deeper: a fear of freedom, and a desire to shrink other people’s lives into neat replicas of their own curated biographies.

So no, this isn’t about budgets or efficiency. The attack on the so-called “eternal student” is an attack from those who grant themselves endless space, but can’t tolerate anyone else having the same.