Laurent Hublet

The through-line

Across five months of governing Brussels, Laurent Hublet keeps returning to one idea: that entrepreneurial urgency, not caution, is what a city government needs. He frames his own move from business into politics as a deliberate risk, not an accident, and repeatedly measures his ministry's work against a promise he made himself and voters at the moment he took the oath: "y aller à fond" . That posture has not shifted since February; if anything it has hardened into a governing method, showing up in how he staffs institutions, funds transitions, and talks about AI and climate as tests of whether Brussels moves fast enough.

The other constant is that he treats economic and social policy as inseparable. Digital sovereignty, disability care, diversity labels and climate spending are all presented not as separate portfolios but as pieces of the same project: making Brussels work for the people who live there.

On entrepreneurial urgency and who leads

Hublet describes his own appointment as improbable and treats speed as a moral obligation once in office: "Je suis entrepreneur. Je ne m'attendais pas à devenir ministre" , followed immediately by "Nous n'avons pas une seconde à perdre. Nous n'avons pas le luxe de faire des mauvais choix" . That same logic drives his approach to appointments: he wants "des entrepreneurs prêts à mouiller le maillot" running Brussels's economic tools , and he insists that even administrative recruitment, such as the search for Actiris's new director general, be "ambitieuse et rigoureuse" through parallel French- and Dutch-speaking selection committees .

On digital and AI sovereignty

Hublet's framing of sovereignty is explicitly relational rather than defensive: "Digital Sovereignty is about partnerships & scale. About people & places" . After the G7-adjacent AI summit in Lille, he sharpened this into an urgency claim: "l'intelligence artificielle n'est plus un sujet d'avenir; c'est un enjeu immédiat de souveraineté, de développement socio-économique et de transformation de nos territoires" . He backs this with a stark local stake, noting that in Brussels "près de 80% des emplois s