Traditionally, Belgian EU Presidencies are characterized by an ambitious social agenda. It is, however, unclear to what extent these ambitions are translated into real policy accomplishments. In this article we aim to disentangle the genuine influence of the Belgian 2010 EU Presidency on the European social policy agenda by applying the agenda-shaping framework developed by Jonas Tallberg. Making use of elite interviews and by studying policy documents, we reach a twofold conclusion. First of all, the Belgian Presidency has left its footprints in some specific social policy topics, especially with regard to social impact assessment and child poverty. However, – in line with theoretical expectations – agenda-setting initiatives were less successful than agenda-structuring techniques. Secondly, our findings also shed preliminary light on the determinants of Presidency influence as identified by Simone Bunse. We find that the Belgian social ambitions were curtailed by political and economic constraints, policy preferences in the Council, the difficult inter-institutional dialogue (especially with the European Commission), and the limited Presidency skills of certain Belgian policy actors.

In the past decades, employment and incomes were on the rise, social spending remained high while passive welfare states were progressively transformed into so-called ‘investment states’. Despite these favourable conditions, however, contemporary welfare states did not succeed in reducing poverty and inequality. What lies beneath the disquieting poverty standstill and how did welfare states miss this ‘window of opportunity’? In this article, we aim to shed more light on this question. We identify three structural trends behind the poverty standstill: rising employment has benefited workless households only partially; income protection for the working-age population out of work has become less adequate; social policies and, more generally, social redistribution have become less pro-poor. In other words, the reorientation of social expenditures to the employed occurred at the expense of those at risk in the labour market. The success of future poverty-reducing strategies will depend on the way policies aimed at labour market inclusion will be implemented and the emphasis on redistributive policies.