State of the Union / About this site
About this site
Everyone can have a say in, and vote on, policy. To do that you need the figures, and they are often hidden in tables, reports and jargon. This site brings together the key official figures about Belgium, explains them in plain language and shows where every figure comes from. The figures tell you what is; what you make of it is up to you.
How does it work?
Every day a program automatically fetches the figures from the official sources, checks them and rebuilds the site. Nobody types figures in, and no AI is involved in the figures themselves. Some figures we calculate ourselves from official figures, such as debt per inhabitant; those show the formula and the source of each part. If a source later revises a figure, we take over the new version and keep track of the revision. If fetching fails one day, the last valid figure stays up, with a note.
Neutral
The site does not pass judgement. Sentences such as "higher than the EU average" are calculated from the data and only compare. Colours are used only to recognise topics or to show an official standard or target. You can show the federal governments on the charts, with the warning that a government is never the only cause of how a figure develops.
Sources and reuse
The figures come from these institutions. They allow reuse with acknowledgement of the source; their own terms are behind the link.
Privacy
This site uses no cookies and collects no personal data. The calculator runs in your own browser: what you enter is not sent anywhere. If you switch on the governments on the charts, that choice is stored only in your own browser. To know how many people visit the site, we count visits with GoatCounter: without cookies, without tracking you across other sites and without storing personal data.
Built with AI
The code and texts of this site were written with the help of Claude, an AI by Anthropic. Not the figures: they come straight and automatically from the sources. All code is public, so anyone can check how it works.
About the maker
Jonathan Maes made this site as a personal, independent project. He believes everyone should be able to find and understand the figures behind policy. No party, organisation or government pays for or steers this project.
Spotted a mistake?
Question, idea or spotted a mistake? Email sotu@jonathanmaes.be.