Daniel Ducarme | |
Office: | Minister-President of Brussels |
Term Start: | 6 June 2003 |
Term End: | 18 February 2004 |
Predecessor: | François-Xavier de Donnea |
Successor: | Jacques Simonet |
Birth Date: | 8 March 1954 |
Birth Place: | Liège, Belgium |
Death Place: | Brussels, Belgium |
Party: | Reformist Movement |
Daniel Ducarme (pronounced as /fr/; 8 March 1954, Liège – 28 August 2010[1]) was a Belgian politician and former Minister-President of the Brussels-Capital Region.
Starting his political career in the Liberal Reformist Party (PRL), Ducarme served as mayor of Thuin in Wallonia from 1988 to 2000, becoming party president in 1999. In 2000 he moved to Schaerbeek in the Brussels-Capital Region and stood for election to the Schaerbeek council.
The PRL merged with its centre-right partners to create the Reformist Movement (MR) in 2002, which Ducarme led as president.
Ducarme has voiced his support for Rattachism.[2]
In 2003 he replaced his MR colleague François-Xavier de Donnéa as Minister-President of the Brussels-Capital Region, provoking considerable resentment among parties representing the Flemish-speaking community as he was essentially a monoglot Francophone, unlike his predecessors as Minister-President.
Ducarme resigned in 2004 following allegations of improprieties by the newspaper L'Avenir concerning his tax affairs.[3] He claimed his fiscal status was fine and that he had been "shot in the back" by a member of his own party.[4] He was succeeded as Minister-President by Jacques Simonet and as president of the MR by Didier Reynders.
In 2006, Ducarme proposed to return to politics, wishing to stand in Schaerbeek on the MR list in the October 2006 elections, but the MR did not follow suit and excluded him from its list.[5] In apparent compensation he was appointed by Reynders to represent the MR as a roving ambassador abroad. Ducarme died of cancer on 28 August 2010.