Extra Post about Brussels NatCon conference: remember you’re defending liberal democracy

Not shutting down conferences by people you don’t like

Police surrounded the hall were British anti-european agitator Nigel Farage had been due to speak. He had been one of the headline draws at something called the “National Conservative Conference”, right wing nationalist conference held in n Brussels. To get a sense of its drift: its previous edition in London featured a dinner where firebrand right wing writer Douglas Murray, standing beneath a dinosaur skeleton, saw fit to joke that nationalism was fine, if only the Germans hadn’t mucked it up.

Naturally, Viktor Orbán was also on the list and the jamboree got generous support from various taxpayer funded offshoots of the Budapest regime.  The cops had been sent in on the orders of the mayor of the commune, where the conference had been displaced after other more salubrious venues had disinvited it under political pressure.

It exposed the ugly face of some of the supposed defenders of liberalism, and played into the populist right’s self-image as a oppressed freedom fighters rather than a well funded political movement able to invite the current and former ministers to its events.

It raised questions about the rule of law in Belgium, though the Belgian Prime Minister had the sense to denounce the raid as unconstitutional, and the Council of State issued a late-night injunction to allow the conference to continue.

And it compels us to ask whether the supposed friends of the open society know what they are supposed to be defending.

There’s a practice, called “militant democracy,” that argues that sometimes antidemocratic parties need to be banned in order to protect the constitutional system. Some of the speakers at the conference, including former Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki have done huge damage to constitutional democracy, but they are European citizens with normal political rights. He was removed at the ballot box and accepted defeat. He didn’t for example, lead a mob to the Polish parliament to try and have the result overturned.

The Brussels meeting wasn’t a coup attempt — it was a conference of political speeches that belongs in a free society. If you disagree with the national conservatives set up your own conference to argue against them, don’t send the police in to have it shut down.

Participants in democratic politics need to be able to take disagreement and personal criticism. We elect people because of their character, not only their policies. Even though it doesn’t amount to policy debate, there’s no problem lampooning the national conservatives: here are supposed free marketeers going to a conference funded by the outgrowth of a crony-capitalist state; believing Christians sharing a stage with the leader of a government in trouble for covering up paedophilia pardons.

The irony of hard right nationalists having their conference surrounded by police sent by a mayor expelled from his own party for hosting a conference of …hard right nationalists; or of opponents of judicial review being able to resume because a judge has overruled the local democratically elected mayor should be savoured, slowly and deliciously, like the best Belgian chocolate truffle.

But it is completely unacceptable to put political pressure on venue not to host the event — that’s what the national populists do, and what we criticise them for. And it’s certainly outrageous to send police to break up the meeting.

So remember that it is democracy you’re supposed to be defending against  populist elected dictators, not using their tactics against people you don’t like.