Brussels’ Tammany Halls

A fifteen-minute stroll north from the European Commission HQ in Brussels, where you can safely smoke indoors in one of many Turkish-run coffeehouses is roughly the point that you realise that the authority of the Belgian state is wearing thin, right in its own backyard.

Less than a decade since the airport bombing by ISIS militants, Brussels in 2025 has a front-row seat for a new disturbing norm within Western Europe: at the intersection between criminality, local politics, and multicultural oversaturation.

A vortex of narcoterrorism and embryonic Islamic populism is opening up and consuming the institutional remnants of the flatlining Belgian state with the repercussions reshaping the very social texture of the city.

Europe’s cocaine revolution is taking the Belgian capital by storm, pouring gasoline on decades worth of sloppy integration policies that have resulted in ghettos of Turks and Moroccans inhabiting the north of the city. 

From street-level toughs to a local economy of empty corner shops and hairdressers driven by money laundering, the telltale signs of Belgium’s narcotics revolution are there for eyes to see.

While Brussels so far lacks the pipe bombings or torture chambers now normal in Antwerp, a bloody turf dispute between local Moroccan gangsters and Algerian outsiders around the apartment complexes of the municipality Saint-Gilles last year attests to the civic freefall.

Private security has noticeably heightened in the aftermath of Islamist shootings by a Tunisian asylum seeker last year as riot police did battle with Arab youths in the northern districts over the Christmas period.

Proximity to Antwerp harbour and the global machinations of Moroccan, Turkish, and Albanian mobsters who in alliance with Latin cartels are fuelling this new cocaine zeitgeist as authorities ponder following Sweden’s lead and deploying troops to combat the rising crest of violence.

The roots of Brussels’s contemporary crime wave lie in the post-war migration patterns that invited Moroccan and Turkish workers to fill a shortfall in the dying days of industrialisation. 

Aside from economic short-termism, the weaponisation of the asylum system to import new voters to subdue Flemish nationalism as well as the past decade of illegal migration has all contributed to a tribal urban space. 

While Moroccan émigrés, predominately from the rural Rif region, always dabbled in hashish and the Turks likewise in heroin, professionalisation caused by contact with Latin cartels has transformed the industry and introduced a new level of sociopathy an emasculated Belgian state simply cannot counter.

Government officials are now regularly forced into hiding as highlighted by the recent ordeal of Belgian Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne, following a failed plot to kidnap him.

The city’s transport hubs at Gare du Nord and Gare de Midi are becoming open-air embarrassments for the city elite due to the near-comedic openness of criminality. Even the European Commission privately sweats over putting new offices in diverse communities north of the Royal Palace.

Adjacent to this, a myopic decision in 2022 to legalise prostitution right at the cusp of the Ukrainian war has prompted an explosion in human trafficking within red-light districts.

Specialising originally in Mexican cartel violence before turning his attention to narcoterrorism in the Netherlands and Belgium, anthropologist turned crime journalist Dr. Teun Voeten is one of the few public voices acknowledging the epoch-defining shift occurring on the street.

“If it rains in Holland it inevitably drips into Belgium,” Voeten says of the permeation of Dutch narco-politics into Brussels going on to describe how the dysfunctionality of the city lends itself to infiltration by gangs.

For Voeten a combination of PC culture and mass migration has helped breed a new generation of “narco-capitalists” in Belgium which in turn could set in motion the rise of a distinct brand of “gangster Islamism” down the line.

While Western Europe has so far avoided the plague of fentanyl abuse that has hit the United States, to Voeten, it could be only a matter of time before Chinese or Latin American actors team up with established gangs to rain further misery onto European streets.

… the understanding that the underworld very quickly morphs into the overworld is key

Yet to be fully appreciated, this new paradigm is quickly leapfrogging Belgium’s longstanding binary of Flems versus Walloons, as a multibillion-euro money laundering industry, and the espionage services who are often one connection removed from the mobsters, bleed into mainstream and even EU politics.

Indeed, the understanding that the underworld very quickly morphs into the overworld is key to realising how the cocaine merchants of today will alter the politics of tomorrow. 

Akin to the political rise of Irish Americans and their Catholic co-religionists from Sicily in the shadow of Prohibition, the networks and fortunes made within the ghettos of Moleenbeek and Schaerbeek today will likely impact the Belgian Parliament tomorrow.

While reporting on the aftermath of sectarian rioting between Kurds and Turks last year, when balaclava-wearing young men prowled the north of the city at night, I wondered how long it would be before, just like my fellow Irishmen in Boston or more recently Belfast, the smarter of these hoodlums would trade streetfighting for respectable politics.

As evidenced by the recent annulment of local election results in the northern district of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode due to allegations of voter fraud, Brussels may have a trailblazing Islamo-populism in the form of mayor Emir Kir.

Dismissed by the Socialist Party due to his liasons with Turkish ultranationalists, Kir came to international prominence for directing police to break up the 2024 National Conservative conference in the city.

Regularly seen flanked by Ottoman-themed ceremonial guards during parade season, the Emir Kir political machine has consumed Saint-Josse-ten-Noode itself speckled with Turkish-financed mosques and “cultural centers.”

His political networks are paralleled by Moroccan equivalents further north in the city, with the Maoist PTB party riding high after capitalising off Arab anger following the outbreak of hostilities in Gaza.

Weekly marches for Palestine are good places to sample this new brand of Belgian “Islamo-gauchisme”, which blends pro-Soviet old left and new virile Arab and Turkish political blood.

A threadbare EU Parliament counterintelligence service is still scratching the surface at the extent to which Moroccan intelligence has compromised European institutions in the ill-titled Qatargate corruption scandal.

Friday night at Place du Luxembourg in front of the European Parliament is ground zero for this connection between the world of criminal and political intrigue, as parliamentary officials, Commission officials openly mingle with dealers looking to score a fix and potentially expose themselves to blackmailing.

Away from the melting pot, Flemish nationalists from the identitarian Vlaams Belang opine that secession is the only escape route against Belgian multiculturalism. Regardless of their separatist politics, two years living in Brussels has me thinking that an endgame is approaching King Leopold’s Kingdom. 

The era of Belgian social democracy is melting away and an entirely new beast is being formed

Forged in 1830 as a compromise between Catholic universalism and French republicanism and to plug a geopolitical need for a continental buffer zone, this new wave of narco-terrorism heralds an entirely new Belgium, in the same way, Prohibition-era violence terminated WASP hegemony in America.

While the lobbyists and foreign ministers who fly business class into Brussels each week ruminate over the future of Taiwan or Ukraine the very sovereignty of their would-be European federal capital is under siege from Rabat and Ankara’s drug pushers.

The era of Belgian social democracy is melting away and an entirely new beast is being formed at the medieval heart of Europe. Belgian elites promised a post-national blank slate through the social engineering project of mass migration but have instead a new tribal society, quickly cannibalising the husk of a kingdom that birthed it.