RUTHFULLY YOURS

When President Donald Trump compared Brussels, Belgium to a “hellhole” in 2016, the statement caused quite a stir, especially in Europe, and was treated with that mixture of contempt, ignorance and denial of reality typical of a certain “elite” in the European Union. Trump had made these remarks in the context of discussions on immigration and security, and suggested that Brussels had changed for the worse over the years, mainly as a result of uncontrolled lawless migratory submersion.

While the facts proved him right at the time, it might be said in 2025 that the Lebanonization of Brussels shows that his judgment was visionary.

Crime explosion

Crime rates are rising everywhere in Brussels, particularly in an area in the spotlight for its frequent shootings: the Bruxelles-Midi Zone (Saint-Gilles, Forest, Anderlecht). Between 2022 and 2023, notes the newspaper L’Echo, robberies and extortion rose by 23%, robberies without weapons by 34%, pickpocketing by 27%, and armed robberies by a staggering 53%. This area is home to five of Brussels’ 15 drug-trafficking “hot spots.” These hot spots are so “hot” in fact, that even the police hesitate to go there.

The Bruxelles-Midi zone therefore unsurprisingly suffers from a severe shortage of police officers — 20% of positions remain unfilled — mainly due to major recruitment difficulties, such as its low level of attractiveness due to crime, which again unsurprisingly scares off applicants. Are we talking about Mexico City? No, just Brussels. In 2023, gang-related shootings left 7 dead and 131 wounded. “Maybe something’s going on in Brussels. It’s a hypothesis that we can put forward,” the Public Prosecutor’s Office gingerly suggested. “Brussels is a large urban center, which therefore attracts people and does not have the most efficient police structure. It’s the only city in the world with six police forces and the federal police, which is no guarantee of good management. The dispersal of resources makes security costly” – and non-existent.

Criminologists have emphasized that these statistics are not sufficient to describe the crime situation in Brussels. It is essential, warns Vincent Seron, a criminologist at the University of Liège, and Dieter Burssens, a criminologist at Belgium’s National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology, to take into account the “black number” of crime:

“The concept of ‘black number’ covers the fact that the criminal acts recorded by the police do not faithfully represent crime on the ground. Police statistics, by definition, only count offenses brought to the attention of the police. But the police force cannot be everywhere, witness everything and therefore record every criminal act.”

However, not all victims file a complaint, particularly when they feel that “it’s no use” given the general level of impunity in Brussels.

Brussels has entered a wild-west era of “every man for himself,” in which people try to protect themselves as best they can without relying on the failing “authorities.”

Bankruptcy

Brussels’ financial situation is also alarming. The Brussels-Capital Region government debt has risen in just six years from €3.4 billion euros ($3.5 billion) in 2018 to €14.5 billion ($15.1 billion) in 2024. In 2024, the regional government’s revenues amounted to €5.69 billion, while expenditures reached €6.99 billion euros — a deficit of more than 20%. In addition, between 2017 and 2022, the regional government’s expenditures grew by 17.4%, far outstripping the increase in revenues. Currently, its consolidated gross debt is expected to grow from €14.5 billion in 2024 to roughly €22 billion in 2029, with an average annual growth rate of 8.83%. This increase poses a major challenge, potentially leading to a “snowball effect,” exacerbated by a possible rise in interest rates. The Brussels-Capital Region, in short, is bankrupt.

During the last legislature, the Brussels-Capital Region’s personnel costs rose by almost 50%, from €1.2 billion to €1.8 billion. These statistics are not available from the Brussels Institute for Statistics and Analysis. It was Flemish liberal politician Frédéric De Gucht, president of Open VLD Brussels, who discreetly revealed them. “Over the last five years,” he stated in an interview with the daily De Standaard, “the number of civil servants in Brussels has increased by almost 34%.”

One of the most revealing problems, explains Lode Goukens, a PhD student at the Free University of Brussels, is that of STIB, the local public transport operator in Brussels. Under the impetus of Groen and Ecolo — two far-left environmentalist parties in the Brussels regional government — the number of STIB’s employees has risen from 8,798 in 2018 to 10,407 by the end of 2023. At the same time, the number of passengers has fallen.

For Frédéric De Gucht, a candidate for the presidency of the liberal Flemish Open VLD party, such a situation means that it is no longer possible to speak of a “sovereign entity”. The Brussels-Capital Region will have to rely on the intervention of Belgium’s federal government to ensure its financing. “We’ll need someone else to co-sign our loans with us,” he admitted. It is now inevitable that the regional government will be placed under the supervision of the federal government, itself under heavy pressure from its own debt.

Permanent migration tsunami

Belgium, in 2024, received over 3,200 asylum applications just from Palestinians — representing around half of all Palestinian asylum applications in the European Union — and 40,000 asylum applications in total. Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration Nicole de Moor describes that situation as “neither normal nor tenable”. Many of these asylum-seekers have already been granted asylum elsewhere, often in Greece, which poses a problem. According to figures quoted by Darya Safai, the General Commission for Refugees and Stateless Persons (CGRA) grants asylum to 9 out of 10 applicants. There are consequently accusations that the CGRA practices “collective recognition” without assessing individually whether each applicant is really in danger in his or her own country.

Nicole de Moor denied those allegations, but did acknowledge the problem of the high number of Palestinian asylum-seekers in Belgium, and that they had already been recognized elsewhere in Europe. Nevertheless, they demand to come to Belgium: it guarantees them more than any other country in Europe. The Secretary of State “hopes” that the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum can better help to distribute these applications across EU member countries.

Political blockage

Finally, since the June 9, 2024 elections, the Brussels-Capital Region has been singled out for its inability to form a functioning government. Without going into the details of the Belgian institutional web, establishing a government in Brussels presupposes a majority in the two language groups — French-speaking and Dutch-speaking — in the Brussels-Capital Regional Parliament. These two groups, however, are not only unable to reach agreement between them, but even within their own ranks they are now unable to achieve a majority.

It is also worth noting the role now played in Brussels by Islamists, either in a political party of their own, or through “entryism” within other left-wing and far-left parties. Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the streets and media of Brussels have witnessed the normalization of unabashed Islamist discourse and Jew-hatred — less and less hidden behind the pretext of “the fight against Zionism.” When commentator Vinz Kanté, on Brussels TV LN24, calls “the chosen people” (Jews) racist and xenophobic, the only pushback can be seen on social networks; this hateful commentator is kept on the air.

The capital of the European Union is crumbling before our eyes.

Drieu Godefridi is a jurist (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain), philosopher (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain) and PhD in legal theory (Paris IV-Sorbonne). He is an entrepreneur, CEO of a European private education group and director of PAN Medias Group. He is the author of The Green Reich (2020).