A Marxist-Leninist party with a strong Islamic voter base is polling in first place in the city of Brussels prior to national and European elections, overtaking erstwhile Wallonian liberals and Greens as it rallies Muslim voters disaffected by Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
The Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB) has grown popular over the past decade by tapping into Turkish and Arab voters with its vocal ‘anti-Zionism’ and now seems to be Brussels’ most popular political party, with 21% of public support—eating up votes previously held by other socialist parties.
The Maoist offshoot has long been accused of antisemitism; it once burned an Orthodox Jew in effigy at a demonstration. The PTB was most recently criticised for its tacit support of the Hamas terror group’s October 7th massacres in Israel.
PTB leader Raoul Hedebouw supports Islamic veils for girls as young as eight-years-old, while his party as a whole drew near universal condemnation for blaming the 2016 Brussels bombings on Western foreign policy.
Polling analyst Nassreddin Taibi claims that the erstwhile fringe Maoists of PTB have profited from “staunchly pro-Palestinian rhetoric that resonates well with the big Muslim electorate in Brussels,” an Islamic electoral bloc made up of approximately one quarter of the city population, according to census figures.
The party currently holds 10 out of 75 seats in the Wallonian Parliament and endorses the BDS boycott campaign against Israel and the dissolution of the NATO military alliance.
Despite the appearance of being a serene European city with the prestige of being the EU capital, Brussels has battled with the rise of grassroots Islamism, coinciding with the rise of narco-crime in the past decade. Just this month a bloody turf war erupted between rival Moroccan and Algerian gangsters.
Separate from the PTB, other Belgian socialist parties are being transformed by the presence of numerically strong Islamic caucuses, with one Socialist MP of Turkish extraction popular in the northern ghettos refusing to resign after inviting an imam to read out anti-semitic tracts of the Qur’an at the parlement bruxellois last week.
Belgium is not alone in witnessing the rapid rise of fusionary Islamo-Left politics. A new party launched by the Turkish diaspora hopes to enter the German Bundestag. Meanwhile in Britain, ‘Gaza George’ Galloway is now the bookies’ favourite to win the Rochdale by-election, with strong support from Pakistani-background Muslim voters fuelled by animosity towards the Labour Party over its equivocal support for Israel after the Hamas pogrom.
Federal elections will be held in Belgium on June 9th, with mainstream media issuing perfunctory warnings about the rise of the ‘far Right’—citing Flemish separatist party Vlaams Belang, expected to achieve its best result yet. The state of municipal politics in the Belgian capital should focus commentators’ attention elsewhere.
