Belgium’s Islam Party: Low participation, enormous ambitions

Belgium’s Islam Party is seeking to consolidate its footing on the political scene in Belgium and is considered a new political party in the country. The party also won the municipal elections in 2012 – the same year it was founded – with two seats in the Belgian capital city of Brussels.

The party’s leaders are stirring a widespread debate in Belgium with their media statements, especially as the municipal elections are due to be held next October. The party will compete in 14 out of the 19 municipalities affiliated to Brussels where the party is seeking to apply the Islamic shar’ia law.

The party puts on its official website the electoral program that it seeks to implement once it wins the elections and focuses on “applying Islam with a different vision from the dark concepts that have stuck to Islam.”

The public transport company in Brussels had dismissed the party’s founder, Radwan Ahroush, as a driver because of his proposal in a press interview to separate men from women in public transport. The company issued a statement denying that this proposal came as part of the company’s vision or policy towards beneficiaries of its services.

Belgian Minister of State for Equal Opportunities Bianca Debaetsconsidered the proposal shocking and contradicting with democratic values. She said that she was considering filing a lawsuit against the party because his ideas were contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights.

He has been a driver for the company since 1993 and his first attempt to enter politics was in 1999 when he founded a political party called the Nour Party. However, this party was unable to attract supporters. Ahroush is known for his activities in the community of Shi’ite Muslims in Brussels since the 1990s. He also co-founded the first Shi’ite Muslim mosque in the Belgian capital.

Although there is no specific statistics on the total number of Muslims in Belgium, most government institutions estimate Muslims as five percent of the population which stands at 11 million. Most Muslims live in the cities of Brussels, Alonia and Flanders. The number of Muslims in Belgium has increased with the arrival of immigrants from Morocco and Turkey who have come to work in Belgium in the seventies of the last century.

The rise of Belgium’s Islam party is troubling the rest of the political parties. In the 2014 parliamentary elections, the party received 9,412 votes, or 2 percent of the vote, a high percentage for a new party in political life, but that did not enable it to enter parliament.

The activity of the party began in the district of Möllenbeck, which has a population of about 96,000, of whom 45 percent are Muslims. The European media consider this neighborhood to be the focus of radical Islamists throughout Europe. Five of the perpetrators of the Paris attacks in 2015, which resulted in the deaths of 130 people and the injury of 368 others, were residents of this neighborhood.

Some politicians call for banning the party as they consider it calling for values  and principles that run counter to the Belgian Constitution. Bart Do Weaver, the new leader of the New Flemish Alliance, said that no compromise would be made to relinquish the values  of the Enlightenment Era, adding that those opposed to the principles of democratic values  should go elsewhere. Meanwhile, Gernolden Rotten of the Flemish Liberal Party said, “Anyone who fights our freedom will find us in confrontation with him.”