Packing the Brussels City Council

TA, an enterprising and resourceful reader, has done an extended investigation into the makeup of the Brussels city council as a follow-up to my post from last night. His conclusions are informative, even if they won’t be a big surprise to most of our readers. Here’s the email he just sent us:

Hi Baron,

Intrigued by Cimmerian’s post on the Brussels city council, I have done some further checking with unexpected results. If you are interested, here it is:

Brussels City Council

Composition according to political parties (Data were taken from the list of councilors on the official city website. The political parties were identified according to Wikipedia):

Party initials		Party name		Party political ideology		#		Mus.
CDH		Centre démocrate humaniste		Christian democracy		11		2
ECOLO		Écologistes Confédérés pour l’organisation de luttes originales		Green		4		1
MR		Mouvement Réformateur (Renouveau bruxellois)		Liberalism (free market + social)		10		0
PS*		Parti Socialiste		Social democracy		17		10
SP		.a-spirit-Groen!		Coalition of convenience between socialists & green		2		0
VLBE		Vlaams Belang		Flemish separatism, conservatism		2		0
VLD		Vlaamse Liberalen en Democraten		Flemish, Liberalism		1		0
Total						47		13

^*Note: Councilor Jean Baptiste de Crée, listed by Cimmerian as part of the PS, is not actually so. Though now listed as belonging to “Mouvement socialiste”, he was elected on the ticket of the “Renouveau bruxellois”, mostly MR, which is what matters for assessing voters’ intentions. See the above link for the list of councilors.

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Analysis

This is a foreigner’s impression of Brussels city council, no doubt lacking in understanding of political issues specific to Belgium, and concentrating merely on the issue of Muslim/Arab representation. Also, my only criterion for counting a councilor as Muslim/Arab is his/her name. I know nothing else about any of them. If anybody with access to additional data finds any of my conclusions wrong, I shall gladly be corrected. So here we go.

Political parties on the Right and Center (MR, VLBE and VLD), with no Muslim/Arab members, hold 27.6% (13 out of 47) of the seats on the city council. In addition, nearly 32% (15 out of 47) of the seats are held by CDH and ECOLO, including token Muslim/Arab representation (3 out of the 15 elected). Altogether — about 59.6% of the vote went to the Right and Center with some representation for immigrants, a clear majority (I count the ECOLO greens as center, because there are other greens to their left in the SP.a-spirit-Groen! Maybe I’m wrong here, but even without them the Center-Right still commands 51%).

One of the things I cannot tell is whether the CDH and ECOLO actually got any Muslim/Arab votes, or if the presence of such candidates on their list is merely a quirk of the system of Proportional Representation, with block-lists composed by party members regardless of the composition of the actual constituency. Anybody know?

The situation with the PS socialists is completely different. While clearly a minority among the electorate as a whole, some 36% (17 out of 47), it fielded a majority of Muslim/Arab candidates (10 out of the 17 eventually elected). This suggests that this party is largely dependent on the Muslim/Arab vote. It is therefore in its interest to increase immigration.

The bottom line is that Socialism finds itself in a minority in Brussels, and attempts to reverse the trend by encouraging the importation of foreign population. To my mind, this is no different from classic Imperialism.

And now to the big question: How typical is this neo-Imperialism of other European Socialist parties, whether local or national?

The strategy at work in Brussels is the same employed by the Left in the rest of Europe and throughout the West.

The Left and Socialism have long since been discredited in the public mind, and can no longer stay in power in a free and open democratic system. To maintain their control they rely on a four-pronged strategy to inflate their electoral base:

1.		Increase the public sector by expanding government power and adding as many state jobs as possible.
2.		Expand the number of government beneficiaries. Means to accomplish this include keeping the rate of unemployment high, defining disability to include more people, undermining the family and other traditional social institutions in order to create more welfare beneficiaries, etc.
3.		In order to increase the available pool of clients for #2, import the type of foreigners who are disinclined to work and be productive, and who do not want to assimilate to the indigenous culture.
4.		Maintain control of the media so that news about the above remains suppressed.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s very much the same process that is currently unfolding in the United States, with the encouragement of both major political parties.

It boils down to two strategies: increase the power of the state, and control the flow of information.

I can’t do anything about the first one, but I’m trying to subvert the second one right now.