Brussels has officially declared itself the world’s first “anti-fascist city”—a move critics say is less about opposing extremism and more about excluding mainstream conservatives from political life. The decision comes just days after a local Antifa group vandalized major venues that hosted the conservative think tank MCC Brussels—an attack the city council has failed even to acknowledge.
Lack of political plurality should be nothing to celebrate, especially in a city that presents itself as a symbol of democracy. Yet, Brussels is adopting the “anti-fascist” label partly to boast about the fact that it has no national conservative councilmen at all. However, it remains unclear what being an “anti-fascist city” really means in practice.
The timing is also ironic, given that just recently, a local Antifa group vandalized ten conference venues that dared to host the events of MCC Brussels, apparently aiming to intimidate them into refusing future events. Numerous MEPs condemned the blatant attack on freedom of expression, but the city council has not even addressed the incident.
This latest declaration was unanimously passed in the Brussels city council last week, ahead of the May 8th celebrations marking 80 years since the end of World War II in Europe.
Officially, the symbolic title aims to highlight the Belgian capital’s historic contributions to the fight against fascism, but the real goal, as explicitly stated by the motion’s author, is to entrench the city’s political firewall against conservatives for decades to come.
The motion was tabled by Green councilor Zoubida Jellab, who argued that Brussels needs to stand firm because “far-right ideas are very much alive today.” Jellab made clear she was not just targeting extremist fringe groups, but specified that the enemies were conservative parties with broad democratic mandates around the West:
In the United States under Trump, but also here in Europe, in Italy, Poland, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Slovakia, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and in Belgium.
Jellab added that by declaring itself an “anti-fascist city,” Brussels reinforces its commitment to fight all forms of hatred, including fascism, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. The latter is ironic, given that many of the parties who supported the motion explicitly supported the city’s numerous anti-Israel protests, which called to free Palestine “from the river to the sea”—in other words, to wipe the only Jewish state off the map.
The motion enjoyed unanimous support from the council after Mayor Philippe Close strongly endorsed it in the name of his socialist, liberal, and Christian Democrat coalition.
Mayor Close said he was very proud of the city council’s current multicultural make-up—that councilors came from “all four corners of the world”—and that no “fascist” has been elected into their ranks for over two decades now. In Belgium, these labels usually refer to the Flemish Vlaams Belang (VB/PfE) and New Flemish Alliance (N-VA/ECR), which are, ironically enough, the country’s two largest parties.
“Europe’s largest cosmopolitan city is once again leading by example, because it doesn’t matter where you come from. What matters is what you build together,” the mayor added. Well, if “what you build together” referred to Brussels’ flourishing crime gangs that bomb and shoot each other with automatic weapons every other week, then sure, Brussels really is successful.