In 2025, FINN and partner Gosselin & de Walque used linguistic and data-driven analysis to examine how 86 Belgian CEOs talk about their world, based on interviews in De Tijd, L’Echo, Trends and Trends/Tendances. The goal: detect deeper patterns in CEO language in a time of “permacrisis”. Who is genuinely leaning into the future, and who is mainly explaining and qualifying their statements and how convincing does that sound?
The backdrop: Europe in crisis mode
The backdrop is anything but business as usual. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Europe has been in crisis mode. Belief in our own sustainability ambitions and the “Brussels effect” is eroding, the peace dividend has disappeared, and the shock of inflation and expensive energy is still working its way through the system. Bankruptcies and collective layoffs in Belgium are at their highest level in a decade, with the chemical industry as the canary in the coal mine. At the same time, the next waves are already visible: rising public debt and a demographic cliff as the baby boom generation leaves the labour market en masse.
CEO agendas: Key priorities for 2025
Against that backdrop, it is revealing to see what CEOs themselves put on the agenda. At the top of their worry list are European competitiveness, policy and (over)regulation: these topics appear in more than four out of five interviews (81.8%). Trade, tariffs and protectionism follow at around 70%, with geopolitical instability and Ukraine just above 60%. Decarbonisation and climate are close behind, also around 60%. Labour, talent and demographics, AI and digitalisation, and energy costs and energy policy all cluster just under that level, between roughly 57% and 59%. China, despite its strategic weight, is explicitly mentioned in only a quarter of the interviews.
Taken together, these signals sketch a paradox. In several sectors, the economic and geopolitical storm is more intense than anything seen in the past decade, and CEO agendas are dominated by structural issues such as competitiveness, regulation and trade. Yet the average Belgian consumer does not (yet) experience a classic crisis mood: the National Bank still sees households as relatively resilient in 2025. The authors describe it as a drôle de crise: for some companies it is code red, while society as a whole is not in crisis mode. An uncomfortable gap between boardroom reality, political debate and public perception.
“In several sectors, the economic and geopolitical storm is more intense than anything seen in the past decade, yet the average Belgian consumer does not (yet) experience a classic crisis mood.”