Belgian police shut down far-right conference ahead of June’s European elections

BRUSSELS — Belgian police shut down a rally for far-right politicians and supporters on Tuesday citing security concerns, but protesters protested the suppression of free speech and said they would find another venue for a second day. I swore.

This year, the annual Conservative Party conference will be held in Brussels ahead of elections across Europe. As the campaign heats up for the June 6-9 event, mainstream parties fear disillusioned voters will turn their attention to the nation at Natcon in 2024.

“This is what we are facing. We are confronting a new form of evil ideology,” said Nigel Farage, who is credited with pulling Britain out of the European Union. spoke at a gathering of hardline nationalist and Christian fundamentalist politicians and think tankers.

Anti-immigrant sentiment was featured in many speeches. Some targeted “narco-socialism” and “woke indoctrination”, seen as climate policy folly, and in many cases fiercely opposed transnational organizations like the European Union.

Polish lawmaker Richard Legutko slammed the treaty of EU accession and the preamble of the EU’s founding document, which aims for an “increasingly close union” among the 27 member states, all of which he said were “like medieval times”. It makes the monks look like intellectual anarchists.”

According to the survey, mainstream parties are likely to remain in power after the June elections, but there is a good chance they will reduce their majorities.

Belgian police quietly called off the conference, banning participants from re-entering the venue if they dared to leave. More than a dozen police officers blocked off the front entrance. This venue became the third venue for the rally after the owners of the other two venues walked away when anti-fascist protesters vowed to filibuster the event.

This year’s Natcon, sponsored by the Edmund Burke Foundation, an American conservative think tank, was held under the slogan of “national conservatism that preserves the nation-states of Europe.”

French far-right activist Eric Zemmour was scheduled to criticize the EU’s new immigration and asylum rules, but was rejected by police. Suella Braverman, who served as Britain’s home secretary for just over a month before being sacked in 2022, lambasted the European Court of Human Rights for 27 minutes.

Politicians and former leaders from Spain, Poland and the Netherlands were also on the agenda. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was scheduled to speak on Wednesday.

“I guess they can no longer take away freedom of speech,” Orbán posted on social media platform X. “The last time they tried to use the police to silence me was in 1988 when the communists turned the police on me. I didn’t give up then and I won’t give up this time! ”

Speakers evoked the grand ideas of figures such as Pope, Homer, Dostoyevsky, Leo Strauss, Tocqueville, and Gramsci. English was the common language, interspersed with classical Latin. Modern liberal democracy has been likened to a form of “neo-Marxist authoritarianism.”

But most of those who were able to speak before the rally was shut down for the day focused on “enemies” in mainstream parties.

“We must know that the enemy is in a state of panic and is showing it every day,” said Hermán Telc, an EU lawmaker from Spain’s far-right Vox party. “The enemy knows their time is running out.”

Brussels police warned that time for the conference would be limited, but Yoram Hazony, president of the Edmund Burke Foundation, urged participants to stay as long as they dare.

“New democracies work in mysterious ways. Your goal as a member of a new democracy is to stop the other person from speaking,” Hazony said.