Alexander De Croo led a Belgian party with almost no political experience
In December 2009, Alexander De Croo, a business engineer who had run his own intellectual property services company, was elected leader of Belgium's Flemish liberal party after entering politics only that year. Observers found it remarkable. Eleven years later he was prime minister.
Born in Vilvoorde on 3 November 1975, he is the son of the veteran politician Herman De Croo. He studied business engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, earned an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School in 2004, worked as a project leader at Boston Consulting Group and in 2006 founded Darts-ip, serving intellectual property professionals.
His first campaign, for the European Parliament in 2009, brought more than 47,000 votes. Months later he won the party presidency in a second-round vote, 11,676 to 9,614. Within five months he had pulled his party out of the governing coalition over the long-running Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde electoral dispute, bringing down Yves Leterme's government in April 2010.
From 2012 to 2020 he served as deputy prime minister under three premiers, handling pensions, then development cooperation and the digital agenda, then finance. In that period Belgium became the first country to suspend development aid to Burundi after unrest began there, and he pledged €25 million toward wiping out African sleeping sickness.
On 1 October 2020, more than a year after an election, his so-called Vivaldi coalition took office, and half of its ministers were women, a larger share than in any earlier Belgian government. After his party's heavy defeat in June 2024 he announced his resignation, staying on as caretaker until Bart De Wever took over on 3 February 2025. He now heads the United Nations Development Programme.
Source: Alexander De Croo
