Brussels Has Already Changed
Outside the European Parliament in Brussels, I sat down with Sam Van Rooy, a Belgian MP from Vlaams Belang, to discuss one of the most explosive issues in Europe today: the demographic and cultural transformation of Western Europe through mass migration.
And nowhere is that transformation more visible than in Belgium itself. Only 1 in 10 children in Brussels has two Belgian parents. In Antwerp, where Sam Van Rooy lives, nearly 60% of residents now have a foreign background. This is no longer a future projection. It is already happening.
The Vlaams Belang politician says Antwerp became one of Europe’s first major “minority-majority” cities nearly a decade ago.
Today, only around 43% of Antwerp’s 560,000 residents have two Belgian-born parents, while nearly 57% are either foreign citizens, first-generation migrants or second-generation migrants.
Most of the demographic transformation has been driven by non-European migration from countries such as Morocco, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan , giving large parts of Antwerp an increasingly non-European character.
The Islamization of Europe
Van Rooy spoke openly about what he calls the Islamization of Belgium. Walk through neighborhoods in Brussels or Antwerp, he said, and you increasingly see halal stores, mosques, Quranic schools, hijabs and communities governed less by European norms and more by religious and clan pressure. But according to him, the deeper transformation happens behind closed doors.
Women pressured not to leave home. Muslims threatened for eating during Ramadan. Ex-Muslims forced to live double lives out of fear. Families and communities policing behavior according to Islamic expectations rather than European freedoms.
“These things did not exist in Belgium 50 years ago,” Van Rooy said.
Europe Under Threat
Belgium remains permanently at terror threat level three out of four. Van Rooy reminded me of the 2016 Brussels jihadist attacks that killed 32 people, but argued that the bigger danger is not necessarily terrorism itself - it is the gradual demographic and cultural transformation taking place legally and openly.
“The violent Islamization is easier to fight,” he said. “The cultural and demographic Islamization is the real threat.”
He warned that Europe risks reaching a point where democratic societies can no longer sustain themselves under mounting ethnic and religious fragmentation. And increasingly, many Europeans are too afraid to even discuss it. Van Rooy described cartoonists, comedians and public figures self-censoring out of fear after attacks like Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan massacre and the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty.
“A free society dies when people stop speaking because they fear for their safety,” he told me.
The Remigration Debate
One of the most controversial parts of our discussion focused on remigration, a word increasingly entering mainstream European debate.
Van Rooy argued that mass migration has damaged both Europe and the countries migrants leave behind, creating brain drain, demographic collapse and social fragmentation simultaneously. He defended the idea that migrants unwilling to integrate economically or culturally should ultimately be required to leave. Whether Europe’s political class is willing to pursue such policies is another question entirely.
At the end of our conversation, Van Rooy pointed to Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán as two of the few Western leaders willing to use state power forcefully to defend borders and national identity. But his broader warning was darker. Europe, he argued, has become so confident in its own civilization that it assumed the entire world would naturally assimilate into liberal European values.
Instead, Europe itself is changing. Rapidly. And in cities like Brussels, Antwerp and Malmö, that transformation is already impossible to ignore.
