Belgian statesman Gérard Deprez has been since 2008 Delegate General of the European Democratic Party. A two-time member of the European Parliament from 2014 to 2019 and 1984 to 2010, he was Vice-Chair of the Delegation to the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly (DLAT), a member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, or ALDE group, and its group coordinator for the Committee on Budgets (BUDG). He also was a member of the Special Committee on Terrorism (TERR) and sat as substitute on the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs (LIBE). He received in 1995 the honorary title of Minister of State by the King of the Belgians, Albert II. He was previously president and founder of the Citizens' Movement for Change, or MCC, from 1998 until 2020, succeeded by EDP individual member Marie-Christine Marghem. A member of the Belgian Senate from 2010 to 2014, he was a long-time chair of the Christian Social Party, or PSC, serving from 1981 until 1996. Raised in rural Noville in the Belgian Ardennes, he studied Greco-Latin humanities at the seminary for minors in Bastogne, and then went on to the Catholic University of Louvain, completing a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in sociology.