Conservative MEPs have turned to the president of the European Parliament over the move by three district mayors in Brussels last week to shut down the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon), saying: “We cannot ignore the brutal attempt to silence conservative politicians in Brussels!”
In their joint letter to Roberta Metsola, Kinga Gál, the head of Hungary’s Fidesz EP group, and MEPs who addressed the conference said the participants of the event organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation “were the subject of an insult unprecedented in the democratic world”. They noted that the original NatCon venue, the Concert Noble, had cancelled the event under pressure from Mayor Philippe Close just one day before its scheduled date. Then the second venue, Sofitel Brussels Europe, also backed out of the event citing public safety concerns. The organizers were then able to book the Claridge Events Center, which was “raided by police” shortly after the conference began. This, the MEPs said, had come after “the mayor of the district of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, Emir Kir, had decided to ban NatCon on absurd and biased political grounds reminiscent of totalitarian dictatorships.”
The ruling on banning the event “reproaches its participants for their national conservatism, defense of national sovereignty, Euroscepticism and traditionalism, and accuses them of homophobia, Islamophobia and violation of human and minority rights”, they said. “This procedure, in addition to being unworthy of a Member State of the European Union, was a serious violation of the speakers’ freedom of thought and conscience, their right to freedom of expression and information and their freedom of assembly, as guaranteed by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union,” they added. The MEPs said the obstruction of politicians and public personalities’ fundamental rights “by such brutal means” in “the very city that claims to be a model of European democracy, tolerance and diversity” could not go unanswered. The signatories called on Metsola to publicly condemn the shutdown of the conference at the EP’s next plenary session. The letter was signed by Hungarian Fidesz MEPs Kinga Gál and Enikő Győri, Polish MEPs Ryszard Legutko and Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, Dutch MEP Robert Roos, Spanish MEP Hermann Tertsch and Belgian MEP Tom Vandendriessche.