This speech was delivered in Brussels on 15 May 2025 in English on the occasion of the International Democracy Union Forum.


Mister Chairman, 

Ladies and gentlemen, in all your respective functions, titles and capacities,

Dear friends,

I’m truly honoured to be here, and I want to thank the Right Honourable Stephen Harper for inviting me.

I’m also going to promise to keep it short. But I’m also a politician, so we’re great at making promises. Not so great at keeping them. If I go for too long, you’re getting angry and you have complaints, please give me your feedback and send it to Stephen Harper!

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Dear friends

On this beautiful, sunny evening, I’d like to take you on a brief mental journey. And although it is unusual for me, I want to strike a hopeful note about the future.

I can already hear some of you thinking: Hopeful about the future? We’re conservatives—aren’t we supposed to be only hopeful about the past? Especially in times like these, with geopolitical turmoil, threats to our democratic values, and economic uncertainty pressing in on all sides?

Let me reassure you. I’m the prime minister of a country whose financial legacy, left by the previous green-left government, resembles a shipwreck. A shipwreck the size of the Titanic. The task I face now is nothing less than hauling that wreck from the ocean floor and getting it seaworthy again. And I have to do this in stormy weather. So yes, I’m acutely aware of the gravity of our times.

But tonight, I want to sail a different course and leave the day-to-day political struggle. I want to reflect instead on our core values as conservatives and classical liberals. Where do we stand today?

Just a few weeks ago, I was invited to debate with a local Flemish famous philosopher Maarten Boudry, who presented his latest book, which is titled the Betrayal of the Enlightenment. In it, he argues that since the 1960s, the progressive movement has increasingly turned against the core values of the Enlightenment.

Though Boudry still considers himself a progressive, he laments how the left has abandoned the ideals of universalism and belief in progress and is even actively combating them. In their place, he says, stand new idols to be revered: the sanctity of the victim, environmental doom-mongering, postmodern jargon, and western self-hatred.

The left now thinks modernism only gave the powerful in the past more power to do awful things to their victims. Every fruit from that poisonous tree of modernism must be rotten. Our identity therefore is a lie that must be rejected. And as long as we, the West, don’t self-destruct, we are bound to go on to destroy the world. Figuratively and even literally.

Boudry urges his fellow progressives to reclaim the belief in progress. He champions technological innovation, strong economies and markets, universal human rights, personal freedoms and liberal democracy—not as threats, but as engines of improvement.

After the debate, Boudry gave me a copy of his book to thank me. In his dedication, he wrote that he thinks conservatives are sometimes better allies to his thinking than his progressive friends. 

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My dear friends,

What he wrote in his dedication is not his perception. It’s simply the truth.

So I asked him: If your progressive friends have left the church of modernism and you’re preaching to an empty choir, isn’t it time to take a long look in the mirror and to admit that there’s nothing to do but to join our conservative ranks?

His answer to that was: “No, because I still believe in change. Conservatives are just chameleons. They change slowly, reluctantly. If you read Hayek, you’ll see why I can never call myself a conservative.”

I had to admit: his words struck a chord with me. In fact, to paraphrase our cherished cofounder, Margaret Thatcher, “Hayek wrote our creed.” So, I returned to Hayek’s brief but bracing essay “Why I’m Not a Conservative”.

I read it and some of his criticisms are historically justified. He accused conservatives of a lack of understanding of economic forces. 

Sadly, that is still partially true today. Unfortunately, we see that some conservative parties sometimes pursue policies that are at odds with the needs of a free market. They allow themselves to be seduced by the lure of protectionism and tariffs. According to Hayek, and in my opinion too, this is a terrible mistake. 

I can also understand Hayek's assertion that conservatives believe that decent men ought not to be too much restricted by rules. But he then links this to our supposed fondness for authority and belief in superior persons. 

That in fact does not sit too well with me. Even Bakunin, the anarchist, respected the authority of the bootmaker. So why shouldn’t we?

What struck me most, though, was Hayek’s core argument against calling himself a conservative. 

That is that we conservatives have a fear of change. A distrust of the new. And so I wonder: is this true? And is it still true?

The Enlightenment began as a movement rooted in rational thought, scientific and economic progress. But from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, it gradually came to represent something far more sweeping: a radical transformation of the moral, political, and social order. 

It is certainly true that conservatives were cautious—at times even fearful—in the face of this upheaval.

But it is not true that conservatives renounced change altogether. As Edmund Burke wrote: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation.”

So we do accept change because we value what must be preserved. Or to put it differently: Tene quod bene.

A century before Hayek, Benjamin Disraeli said the following: “In a progressive country change is constant. The great question is not whether you should resist change, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people. Or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principes, and arbitrary and general doctrines.”

Long before Disraeli, emperor Augustus already articulated this wisdom. Change is necessary, but it must respect the mos maiorum, the traditions of our ancestors.

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Dear friends,

I’ve always liked the image of the train. Since the Enlightenment, progressives have been wanting to ride the high-speed express. They don’t stop at any station; they prefer to race forward, toward a distant, undefined destination. All they know is: we’re not there yet. Every question you ask them: we’re not there yet. But where is ‘there’?

Conservatives, by contrast, don’t want to stand still, but we choose the slower train. Because we value the scenery, stop occasionally to stretch our legs and explore. We always keep in mind who’s on board with us — and where we truly want to go. We keep our hands on the wheel not to derail.

Conservatism isn’t set in stone. It evolves — constantly, but subtly. And that’s how it should be. 

To return to Hayek: I disagree that we have a fear of change. What we do fear is change for its own sake. That’s a crucial distinction. Like Augustus, Burke and Disraeli, we believe in the right kind of change.

Since the 1960s, when Hayek wrote his critique, a Copernican shift has occurred within the progressive movement. In their fevered quest for transformation, the progressive high-speed train triggered the auto-destruct button and is destined to derail and destroy.

Perhaps Hayek was still partly right in the 1960s. But today, he is mostly wrong. The conservative train has since then well arrived at the station of enlightened modernism and belief in progress.

There, we encounter bewildered liberals and other disoriented progressives, left staring into the dust of the high-speed train that thundered past them, chasing visions of apocalypse, self-denial, postmodern madness, hostility to innovation, rejection of prosperity, degrowth, woke nonsense, and so on.

Modernity, once their ideal, has been betrayed by the belief that the past needs to be rejected and that Western penance is our only future. They have abandoned the banner of the Enlightenment.

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Well, dear friends,

My message to you is: Let us pick up that banner. Enlightened conservatism is not just the best response to the challenges of our time. It is the only response — because it is in our DNA to accept and preserve what makes society work.

It is enlightened conservatism that stands between us and two dystopian extremes: authoritarianism on one side, and on the other the postmodern Götterdämmerung of a fully atomised society.

Those are the roads that lead to dictatorship, or to a Hobbesian world where everyone is at war with everyone — and above all, with themselves: Bellum nostrum contra nos ipsos.

The rest of the world watches with a grin as western and liberal democracies mutilate themselves. Of course, their reaction is that they want to see more of that. And the left-wing answer is that we should indeed mutilate ourselves to death.

If that is progressive, then fine. But that means that the legacy of modernism now belongs to us. To the conservatives. It’s ours for the taking.

Who are the champions of technological innovation and economic growth?

Conservatives.

Who defends strong and free markets?

Conservatives.

Who believes in universal human rights, personal freedom and liberal democracy?

Conservatives.

Who has the credibility to tell the story of our past, with all the flaws and failures that go with it, while keeping in mind that we don’t stand on the shoulders of criminals, but that we stand on the shoulders of giants and therefore can look even further in the distance, to a bright future?

Who else but conservatives?

Let us embrace Enlightenment, as conservatives, and defend the principles of modernity. But let’s keep following in the footsteps of our illustrious predecessors as well and apply humility, dignity and integrity.

Let us combine progress with an emphasis on civic spirit, the need for shared values and the importance of community building.

If we do so, a conservative future will be better than the past. In that future, our children will know greater prosperity, better health, fuller opportunities, and richer lives than we ourselves have known. This is the way. This is our way.

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Dear friends,

Freedom. Justice. Prosperity. Democracy. The rule of law. These values have guided the International Democracy Union since its founding — and today, they are more essential than ever before.

The clouds above us today resemble those that hung over the world in 1983, when the IDU was born. Our founders lit a beacon through the dark. Let us keep that flame alive.

And in my final words: my thanks to all who made this event possible. And my thanks to everyone here for attending and listening to me.