For attending galas, cutting ribbons and meeting diplomats, a Belgian prince takes home a royal allowance of 100,000 euros, nearly $110,000, a year. But what will happen when he stops working? For that, Prince Laurent of Belgium is seeking government benefits.
A court this week agreed in part, recommending that the country’s lawmakers consider drawing up regulations for a federal pension for the prince, even as it dismissed his argument that his royal duties were in essence a job and that his incurred expenses were comparable to being self-employed.
His lawyer, Olivier Rijckaert, said in an interview Tuesday that the court had effectively placed the prince in a special category, akin to a “super public servant.” Only one other person is in that category, his lawyer said: the prince’s older sister, Princess Astrid.
The prince, who is 61, will now decide whether to wait for the law to be passed or to challenge the court’s ruling, hoping to speed the process, his lawyer said.
Prince Laurent, the younger brother of King Phillippe, brought the case in 2023, suing Belgium’s National Institute for the Social Security of the Self-employed. He argued in court that without a pension, his wife, Princess Claire, and their three adult children would be left financially vulnerable upon his death or if he halted his duties, according to court documents.
The prince receives a stipend of €400,000 a year, three-quarters of which is used to cover his staff’s salaries plus various trips and entertainment expenses, according to his lawyer. Prince Laurent is required to provide supporting documents for all of those expenses, Mr. Rijckaert said.
That leaves the prince with what amounts to a salary of €100,000, the lawyer said, reduced to roughly €60,000 a year — about $65,000 — after tax. (In Belgium, the average household disposable income is $34,884 a year, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.)
The case has set off a debate in some corners of Belgium on whether royal duties count as work, an argument that Mr. Rijckaert outlined in an opinion piece last year, asserting that his client should be entitled to social security.
“If you think that cutting ribbons, shaking hands and listening to people at length while showing interest (real or feigned) in their activities is not work, give it a few days,” the lawyer wrote.
The prince’s net income, Mr. Rijckaert argued, corresponds to that of a senior executive in Belgium. But “the difference is that the senior executive benefits, in addition to this salary, from full social security coverage,” he wrote. “Not the prince, nor his family.”
The court bid was the latest in a string of spectacles that have earned Prince Laurent the nickname “the prince maudit” — “the cursed prince.”
In 2011, he risked losing his annual stipend when he traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo and met with then-President Joseph Kabila without diplomatic oversight. In the same year, he orchestrated an off-the-books meeting with Libyan opposition officials while Muammar el-Qaddafi was in power.
And in 2018, Belgium’s Parliament voted to cut his annual endowment 15 percent as punishment for his attending an unsanctioned celebration at the Chinese Embassy in full naval uniform.
The prince, patron of charities that focus on the environment and animal welfare, has also been convicted of speeding and of driving an unregistered vintage car, an offense for which he was fined €200 in 2022.
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