Belgium’s suppression of Conservative gathering with dictatorial means happened today

Belgium’s suppression of conservative gatherings with dictatorial means happened today!

Police in Brussels moved in Tuesday to shut down an ongoing gathering of Europe’s elite Conservative movement. All without any disturbances. Belgium has turned into a Beijing, or Moscow, or perhaps worse, where opposition political rallies are banned.

The National Conference of Conservatism was supposed to welcome Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán and British politician Nigel Farage over the next two days, but police arrived two hours before the start of the event at the Claridge, near the European Quarter, to inform organizers that the event would end. All without any violence or infractions having taken place.

‘This is unreformable!’

Nigel Farage lays out his concerns with the European Union whilst police prepare to shut down the National Conservatism Conference. pic.twitter.com/SKOMKVp4qt

— GB News (@GBNEWS) April 16, 2024

“The authorities decided to close the event because of the possibility of public disturbances,” one of the organizers was told by a police officer heard by Politico. There had been no demonstrations or signs of violence, however. The shutters had already been lowered on the venue where Brexit architect Farage was scheduled to give a speech at 11 a.m.

Even well-known British Conservative leader and former interior secretary, Suella Braveman, was supposed to attend the meeting

When he took the stage as the drama continued to unfold outside the venue, Farage called the authorities in Brussels “simply monstrous” for trying to cancel the event.

“I knew I would not be welcome in Brussels,” the former MP vented. The Brexit champion was not the only one to harshly criticize the city’s bureaucracy.

“It’s really something of a provincial dictatorship,” said Frank Füredi, one of the organizers of the right-wing think tank MCC, which co-sponsors the event. “They are trying to use a technical reason to make a political point. They told the owner that if it’s not shut down, they will cut the electricity.” So this was a really appropriate act of violence.

Just over an hour after first arriving, police returned at about 12:45 p.m. to deliver an official order to the event’s local organizer, Anthony Gilland, MCC’s chief of staff. The police gave him 15 minutes to read and sign the three-page document.

With this act, Belgium, frankly, loses all legitimacy in criticizing China and Russia because, in the end, it behaved exactly the same way, in fact perhaps worse: at least those regimes are not so hypocritical.