Maurits Vande Reyde

Maurits Vande Reyde (born 10 July 1985) is a Belgian politician and member of the Flemish Parliament since 2019.

He was previously a member of the Open VLD (which later changed its name to Anders) until he left the party in 2025. Since then, he has served as an independent politician on the Flemish regional level.

Early life and education Born on 10 July 1985 in Leuven, Vande Reyde studied at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he obtained a master's degree in Applied Economic Sciences in 2008.

In the 2018 Belgian local elections, Vande Reyde ran on the local liberal Open Diest list and was elected as a local councillor for Diest, a position he still has. The results of the first round of the party elections on 17 August 2024 showed that Vande Reyde won 19,3% of the vote, making him third and making him unable to go to the second round.

In April 2025, Vande Reyde announced he would exit his party, calling it "too left-wing" and too similar to the Dutch progressive party D66. He stated he had wanted his party to go in a more radical, right-liberal direction, with more emphasis on shrinking the state, but that the VLD's political leadership had not wanted to push for these priorities enough.

He launched the political action group Durf on 4 September 2025.

Political views Across most of his career at the VLD, Vande Reyde was often considered to be one of the party's more right-leaning members, placing less emphasis on the more socially liberal, progressive elements that the party establishment had embraced and instead prioritizing classical liberal ideals, such as a radical push for a smaller government, fiscal conservatism, less taxes, less regulation, less bureaucracy and more entrepreneurship. He has often criticized the ways that mainstream Belgian politics and governments have handled taxation, budget deficits and granting subsidies to lobbies.

He is opposed to the inheritance tax and voted for abolishing financial benefits for purchasing zero-emission vehicles on 6 November 2024, a policy that was implemented by his former party colleague and former Flemish Minister Lydia Peeters. The rest of his party opposed removing the law.

On migration and cultural integration policy, he has lamented how the media (according to him) generalise younger people with a foreign background solely as "youth", saying that the media must call out problems by their names.

After the 2026 United States intervention in Venezuela, Vande Reyde called out members of the far-left Belgian Workers' Party for their criticism of the removal of Nicolás Maduro and added: "Everytime a far-left maniac is removed from power, that's a good thing."