Europe's most powerful party is stoking a Muslim scare - Middle East Eye

At its political assembly in Vienna at the end of June, Ursula von der Leyen's European People's Party (EPP) adopted a resolution that treats Muslim civic engagement as inherently suspect and collective religious practice as a threat.

It extends the approach of Germany's Christian Democrats to "political Islam" and echoes French conspiracy theories about "Islamist entryism". The resolution attracted scant media attention, but the effects of this discourse have already been felt by anti-racist organisations in Brussels and beyond.

The resolution, titled "Interference of Political Islam in European Democratic Processes", is a significant gesture from the party's presidency itself, rather than from an individual member party, national delegation or affiliated group, which gives it particular institutional weight: it reflects the leadership's collective priorities rather than a single member's initiative.

Ideally, such a resolution translates into domestic politics as well, extending beyond supranational efforts at the European level.

While the EPP, whose parliamentary group is the largest in the European Parliament, is usually seen as a big tent bringing Christian-democratic, conservative and other centre-right parties together, it has long been dominated by the German Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), with von der Leyen as European Commission president since 2019 and, by the party's own count, 14 of the 27 commissioners coming from its ranks.

Some political scientists see the party as a "German CDU/CSU-dominated empire-by-invitation" - not in the sense of coercion, but in that smaller parties actively seek German patronage.

To interpret this resolution, it helps to look at how Germany, and the CDU/CSU in particular, has traditionally dealt with what the state terms "political Islam".

From a state policy perspective, "political Islam" or "legalistic Islamism" has served as a means by which the state, drawing on research produced by think tanks and academics, legitimises its interference in Muslim affairs.

The presumption of innocence is reversed for Muslims, whose institutions can be dissolved and wealth confiscated without any act of violence, because the alleged ideology of "political Islam" is treated as a breeding ground for it.

Muslims who participate in civil society, who organise and speak out against racism, are portrayed as using the law to subvert their European nation-states.

The EPP's resolution presents itself as a defence of a Europe "united in its diversity", "respectful of everyone's beliefs, and protective of individual freedoms", and insists that it seeks to ensure both "the peaceful practice of every religion" and the integrity of democratic processes.

In substance, it channels Germany's doctrine of "defensive democracy", born of the post-Nazi era to protect the democratic order against totalitarian movements.

This is not the first initiative of its kind. The short-lived Vienna Forum on Countering Segregation and Extremism, launched by the Austrian government in 2021 with French, Danish and Belgian participation, was an earlier attempt to consolidate the criminalisation of Muslim civil society in Europe.

In 2017, Stop Extremism presented itself as a European popular petition calling on parliament to effectively create a surveillance system that would curtail Muslim civil liberties. Austrian investigations alleged that the UAE financed it.

For all its talk of diversity, the resolution stresses individual rights, explicitly stating that it seeks to ensure "equality among citizens, rather than collective claims" - a formulation that leaves the collective expression of Islam unprotected and hollows out the very idea of religious freedom.

From Christians in churches to Muslims in mosques, religion is by definition not only an individual belief but a communal practice, and religious infrastructures do not stop at the doors of synagogues or temples - they extend into social welfare, education and many other spheres of life.

This restriction to individual rights already amounts to a reinterpretation of a fundamental right.

Borrowing from the French discourse on "Islamist entryism", the EPP defines the term as "a strategy of gradual infiltration of institutions, parties, associations, and administrations to push for a fundamentalist interpretation of a religion, meant to shape the public and political life according to a rigorist vision".

Entryism, it says, "manipulates the democratic concepts by adopting a double discourse, to appear compatible with commonly accepted democratic principles, while its actual agenda runs counter to those values in many ways".

In other words, Muslims who participate in European public life through their religious institutions become suspect.

The EPP suggests this is more than a European problem, citing Russian and Chinese "meddling in democratic procedures" while pledging to coordinate "with relevant partner parties in Europe and other parts of the world, such as the MENA region and the Western Balkans". It names the Muslim Brotherhood and "its affiliated associations" as an example of entryism.

The Abu Dhabi Secrets revelations documented Emirati covert operations in Europe aimed at legitimising the UAE's designation of the non-violent Muslim Brotherhood as a "terrorist organisation" in western countries.

The juxtaposition of China and Russia with cooperation across the Gulf and the Balkans is revealing; in the Balkans, anti-Muslim politics has already been weaponised by secessionists.

The resolution builds on notorious precedents set by other governments led by Christian Democrats, stressing the importance of "mapping Islamist organisations networks".

The venue was telling, for Vienna is home to the projects that pioneered this approach.

The infamous Islam Map, run by the government-backed Documentation Centre Political Islam, plotted virtually every Muslim association in the country on a digital map, and sparked an outcry from civil society and criticism in the Council of Europe.

As Brussels commentator Shada Islam has argued, the resolution is "eerily reminiscent" of Austria's discredited Operation Luxor raids of 2020, which produced no convictions. Its proposed monitoring would take the Documentation Centre model to the EU level.

That monitoring would track "undesirable foreign funding" from actors seen as "promoting the same illiberal agenda", and the resolution calls for the "termination of EU support for these radicalised movements".

It also demands "further academic research" - a cornerstone of German domestic strategy, where the interior ministry's Expert Circle on Political Islamism has long called for academic chairs dedicated to the study of political Islam.

The European Network Against Racism (Enar), a pan-European network of anti-racist organisations based in Brussels, has already felt the impact of this discourse.

In June, days before the resolution was adopted, Fabrice Leggeri - the former Frontex director, now a far-right French MEP - claimed the network was close to the Muslim Brotherhood, an allegation Enar rejected as baseless. He pushed for the network's exclusion from a meeting on the European Anti-Racism Strategy, delegitimising anti-racism advocacy work in the process.

People and institutions that speak out against anti-Muslim racism will feel the effect of this resolution, as Christian-democratic MEPs push to defund work against Islamophobia.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.