Muslims on Brussels City Council

A commenter at Gates of Vienna reported that 10 of 18 members of the ruling Socialist Party in the Brussels City Council have Muslim names, which was both incredible in itself and would also help explain why the Stop the Islamization of Europe demonstration was so brutally squashed. However, the commenter didn’t say what was the total number of seats on the Council. So I did some googling, and found someone named TA who had responded to the GoV post with further research including a table of party membership on the Council, which he had posted in a completely unreadable form. But the same Google search led me back to Gates of Vienna where TA’s information was, fortunately, posted in a readable form. TA explained that of 47 seats on the Council 13 are held by people with Muslim names, and 10 of those are in the Socialist party, which has a total of 17. But if the socialist party has 17 of the 47 seats, while a bunch of center and right parties have a majority of the Council, how can the Socialists be the ruling party? A guess is that the other parties failed to form a coalition, so that the Socialists’ small plurality was enough to give them control.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 12, 2007 07:15 PM | Send