The Muslim Brotherhood has achieved so much influence in Brussels that local politicians now need its support to win elections, according to a French academic who researches the organisation.
“All French-speaking parties have been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood,” claimed Dr Florence Bergeaud-Blackler at a February 21 debate in the EU capital.
Bergeaud-Blackler is author of Le Frérisme et ses networks, a 2023 book about the organisation which won the Prix de la Revue des Deux Mondes.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s top three funders, she says, are Qatar, Turkey, and the European Union.
It is “impossible to win any election in Brussels without the Muslim vote, and the Muslim vote is controlled by the Brothers,” she says.
Bergeaud-Blackler explored this theme in her 2021 book Cachez Cet Islamisme, she adds.
In the first phase, the Muslim Brotherhood acted as representatives of the Islamic communities across Europe, argues Bergeaud-Blackler.
Later, they shifted towards anti-racism and anti-discrimination activists, fighting what they identify as Islamophobia and attracting large amounts of funding.
They have an elite focus, work on a very large timeframe and use “influence, trickery, victimisation, subversion of norms, and interpretations of laws”, she adds.
They work by infiltrating the leaderships of institutions and countries, and making them “sharia-compliant”.
“They influence via economy and culture because the political field is not fully accessible to them,” she says.
It will be increasingly difficult for political parties in Brussels to be able to engage in politics without satisfying the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, Bergeaud-Blackler says.
“Obviously, nobody will notice it, because it’s through influence, through money, corruption”, which is “very difficult” to track and “no one wants to talk about it, of course,” she says.
Bergeaud-Blackler is a prominent French anthropologist and researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, one of the largest fundamental science agencies in Europe.
She participated in a debate on migration and public security in Brussels February 21 for the local branch of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, MCC Brussels, Hungary’s largest centre of extracurricular education.
In the debate, she spoke alongside Dr Rakib Ehsan, who focused on failures of multiculturalism and Britain’s migration and asylum systems.