The Conings case and its aftermath: Post-pandemic extremism still on the rise in Flanders
Post-pandemic Belgium seems to be making a sharp political turn towards the right and far right. This is completely in line with the rest of Europe — just think of the far-right Sweden Democrats’ increased popularity and the election of Italy’s first post-war far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. The Belgian turn is primarily noticeable in the Northern Dutch-speaking region of Flanders: A newspaper poll from December revealed that 25.5 percent of the Flemish population is planning to vote for the far-right anti-immigration party Vlaams Belang [Flemish Interest] during the next elections, with the conservative Flemish separatist party N-VA [New Flemish Alliance] closely following at 22 percent.
At this point in time, almost half of the Flemish voters apparently thus seem to want a Flemish nationalist administration in 2024, which would negatively impact federal coalition talks and Belgium’s political future. And now that N-VA party leader Bart De Wever has stated to be open to collaborating with Vlaams Belang on the condition they get rid of some of their more radical representatives, the 1989 ‘cordon sanitaire’ agreement, meant to keep anti-democratic parties from entering coalition talks, might be put aside soon…
Far-right politics: (Post-)pandemic mainstreaming
One could of course argue that the increased political acceptance of far-right¹ parties isn’t that novel anymore: For political scientist Cas Mudde (The Far Right Today, 2019) and historian Vincent Scheltiens — commenting on Mudde’s book in an article from 2022 — this mainstreaming process has in fact characterized the global far right since the early 2000s and could therefore be interpreted as the far right’s fourth post-war wave, following right after the rise of neofascism (1945–1955), right-wing populism (1955–1980), and the radical right (1980–2000).
What is new to this particular (post-)pandemic mainstreaming process, however, is the environment in which far-right parties have become increasingly politically normalized. The COVID-19 pandemic, colored by politically-motivated conspiracy theories about SARS-CoV-2’s origins, anti-vaxx alt-facts, and destabilizing algorithms-driven disinformation made popular by QAnon and other conspiratorial movements, created an atmosphere that empowered Vlaams Belang and its far-right consorts to reinvent themselves as anti-establishment parties out to undermine ‘freedom-restricting’ governmental authorities.
This establishment critique is largely motived by the shared belief in the anti-Semitic conspiratorial idea that the World Economic Forum’s so-called ‘Great Reset’ program is secretly being implemented by a global elite. These elites are said to have infiltrated national governments that curtailed people’s individual freedom during the pandemic, allegedly not for the benefit of public health, but in exchange for more political power and the subsequent destruction of capitalism and the establishing of an authoritarian socialist world government.
It is noteworthy to mention that Vlaams Belang has asked the Flemish government to cancel its WEF-membership twice since the start of the pandemic, once in November 2022 and once in January 2023. According to Vlaams Belang politician Kristof Slagmulder, the WEF’s “globalist” agenda is too sovereignty-undermining, as it is apparently out to establish “an even more far-reaching open-border policy, a dogmatic climate agenda and woke censorship”.
Fellow Vlaams Belang politician Filip Dewinter underlined Slagmulder’s — and Vlaams Belang’s — conspiratorial WEF-interpretation when re-Tweeting a video that shows WEF-chairperson Klaus Schwab talking about how today’s world in crisis urgently needs to be rebuilt: By adding the hashtag #Davoscratie [Davoscracy], Dewinter suggests that there is a global elite out there that wishes to ‘reset’ the world according to their supposedly anti-democratic beliefs. The lockdowns implemented at the start of the pandemic were apparently also part of the same anti-democratic ‘New World Order’ agenda: Whereas Vlaams Belang in March 2020 initially advocated for a full and total lockdown — of course aided by an anti-Chinese closed borders rhetoric — they switched lanes rather fast a couple of months into the pandemic by criticizing each and every set of rules and legislation as measures supposedly meant to “drastically curtail fundamental freedoms”.
The COVID-19 pandemic did not only help the far right renew its political focus by hyperpoliticizing what was and is in essence a public health issue, but it also allowed the latter to prey on people’s pre-existing feelings of resentment and gain even more clout on various news channels and social media while doing so.
It is this combined political mainstreaming and renewal process, thrust forward by the pandemic and overall increased levels of existential distrust, that seems to have paved the way for even more extremist far-right outliers and events, of which the 2021 US Capitol insurrection is probably the most (in)famous one, as counterterrorism specialist Raffaello Pantucci recently also argued.
Pandemic far-right extremism: The Conings case.
Belgium’s Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis (CUTA) — a federal knowledge and expertise center focusing on terrorist and extremist threats — closely monitored Belgian far-right and other outliers during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In its 2021 activity report, CUTA notes that more than a 10th of the potential terrorist threats it identified in 2021 were related to what in Flanders is referred to as ‘the extreme right’ (extreemrechts) or ‘right extremism’ (rechts-extremisme). These two categories, as explained by Mudde in The Far Right Today (page 7), stand for far-right political parties, activist movements, and lone actors that reject “the essence of democracy, that is, popular sovereignty and majority rule” — the same characteristics Vlaams Belang and other far-right political actors interestingly enough attribute to the WEF and the political establishment.
One example of a major local far-right extremist outlier is the case surrounding Jürgen Conings — a former Vlaams Belang member and professional soldier. Conings was at the center of a manhunt that lasted for weeks in the summer of 2021 over the theft of army weapons and a plot to attack the country’s lead virologist, Marc Van Ranst. And this amid a conspiratorial environment fueled by the global and the Flemish far right and alt-right. Conings had wanted to attack Van Ranst for symbolizing the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdown measures. This became clear in the letter written before he went on the run and killed himself where he said that he was going to “rise up against the political elite and the virologists”, echoing Vlaams Belang and other like-minded parties’ conspiratorial beliefs. One of Conings’ targets also included a local mosque.
Looking back at the Conings case, pandemic discontentment, alt-facts, and conspiracy theories clearly played a major role, and that in combination with toxic far-right extremist beliefs. As underlined in the investigative report published after his death, Conings had been listed as a “potentially violent extremist” (potentieel gewelddadige extremist) as early as the start of 2021. The report also states that Conings had links with other far-right actors and collectives: Conings apparently gave combat training to members of the radical Vlaams Legioen [Flemish Legion] group. He furthermore appears to have been in close contact with fellow ex-military man Tomas Boutens — once imprisoned for leading a neo-Nazi terror group — and the Knights of Flanders — a white supremacist Templars collective known for purposefully spreading anti-vaxx information.
More than a year and a half after the event, the spot where Conings killed himself even turned into somewhat of a pilgrimage site. Initially attracting crowds of conspiracy thinkers, friends, and random supporters, the Dilserbos site has been increasingly hijacked by far-right extremists. Seen through their eyes, Conings is the anti-establishment ‘hero’ par excellence: He had the guts to rise up against a ‘liberty-destroying’ government during the pandemic, or so the far-right story goes.
Far-right anti-establishment figures: Boutens and Yannick V.
Conings isn’t the only anti-establishment figure currently hailed in Flemish extremist circles, however. One of the more prominent Conings supporters is the aforementioned Boutens. Still active in far-right extremist circles as a member (and former chairperson) of the radical Flemish identitarian group Project Thule, Boutens has been regularly featured in the news since Conings’ disappearance. Boutens immediately expressed his support to Conings when he went on the run, was involved in all of the support marches and ceremonies and has been named as a close contact of Conings in all of the investigative reports.
And Boutens popped up on the radar again more recently by sending a Tweet to Marc Van Ranst hinting at Van Ranst’s “totalitarian and freedom-restricting policies” during the pandemic. This suggests that he, like Conings, strongly believes in the pandemic ‘Nuremberg 2.0 Tribunals’ conspiracy theory and is hoping to see virologists and politicians involved in pandemic decision-making put on trial.
Another anti-establishment figure that sent heated Tweets to Van Ranst, pleading to “end” the so-called pandemic “anxiety-induced psychosis”, is Antwerp gold trader Yannick V. Also closely monitored by the Belgian intelligence services, Yannick was shot dead during a counterterrorist operation in October 2022. He had more than 100 weapons stashed at his home and his Twitter feed was littered with conspiratorial libertarian messages reflecting similar anti-vaxx and anti-government ideas to those that motivated Conings.
And yet multiple online communities have defended Yannick V: PNWS recently published multiple articles in his defense, even going so far as to suggest that Yannick V. had unraveled the alleged “conspiratorial motives” behind Conings’ death and was shot dead because he “knew too much”. And according to far-right website ‘t Scheldt — not so secretly connected to Vlaams Belang — Yannick V. is being unfairly framed by the mainstream media as a right-wing extremist. This stands in sharp contrast to the fact that during the October counterterrorist operation, two other suspected extremists linked to Yannick V. were arrested on terrorism charges.
When the anti-establishment goes mainstream: Schild & Vrienden
Far-right extremism that flourished during the pandemic is thus still finding traction in post-pandemic Belgium. Meanwhile, mainstream politics is dealing with a not so unrelated problem. In addition to the ongoing political mainstreaming and normalization of the far right, more obscure movements have also started entering the political domain.
Flemish nationalist youth movement Schild & Vrienden [Shield & Friends] for instance has been making steady political progress despite having started out as little more than a memes-sharing group in 2016, as also documented in the now rather famous Pano-documentary on Schild & Vrienden’s meme-activism.
Neatly following the American alt-right playbook — captured in political scientist George Hawley’s Making Sense of the Alt-Right (2017) and media studies scholar Katrien Jacobs’ Radicaal-Rechtse Seks [Radical-Right Sex] (2021)² — by combining blood-and-soil nativism (similar to Vlaams Belang’s anti-democratic ideology³) and flashy protest actions, Schild & Vrienden quickly turned into a so-called metapolitical youth movement, and that supported by a radical trans-European conservative Catholic network.
As media studies scholar (and former Kif Kif chairperson) Ico Maly also notes in an article from 2019, Schild & Vrienden’s original strategy was metapolitical through and through: In the beginning, the movement solely focused on gaining cultural influence and popularity, and that via manifesto-like videos, xenophobic memes, and coordinated trolling actions — thereby embodying the typical metapolitical focus on “cultural regeneration” instead of engaging in direct political campaigning.
These metapolitical activities actually went as far as getting their army of trolls to create spreadsheets about Belgian academics that had signed a petition against extremist language; performing troll attacks against local antiracist and feminist public figures; and even infiltrating the Flemish Youth Council. Schild & Vrienden’s Facebook-groups and Discords-servers were also packed with memes that were sexist, racist, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic, and also often glorified the Holocaust and Belgium’s bloody colonial past.
But as their members obtained more influential positions, their goals started transcending the purely metapolitical. Dries Van Langenhove, the movement’s founder and a celebrated anti-establishment figure, became a member of the Belgian Federal Parliament under the auspices of Vlaams Belang in 2019, while Schild & Vrienden member Jeroen Bergers recently got elected as the new chairman of young N-VA.
Van Langenhove — who was clearly brought on to attract a younger, although not less extreme, audience to Vlaams Belang and wasn’t the only Schild & Vrienden member with clear links to the far-right party — recently resigned from his position. This has everything to do with the fact that he and 6 other (ex-)Schild & Vrienden-members were effectively referred to court this summer, after a long pre-trial. While some of the (ex-)members have been referred to court on the basis of negationist charges, Van Langenhove first was supposed to stand trial for violating Belgium’s anti-racism and weapons laws. In February this year, it was then decided that Van Langenhove must also appear before the criminal court on the basis of negationism, as he created the online chat groups and encouraged the posting of Holocaust-ridiculing and other hateful memes and messages.
Gathering from his YouTube-channel ‘Kies Dries’ [Elect Dries] — notorious for the constant attacks against the federal government and virologist Van Ranst during the pandemic — Van Langenhove does not seem too perturbed by any of these court cases: In one of his more recent speeches, Van Langenhove, accompanied by a Viking helmet-wearing Swedish Pepe the Frog, can be seen applauding the new Swedish right-wing coalition co-formed with the far-right Sweden Democrats. An accomplishment both him and Vlaams Belang hope to see achieved in the 2024 Belgian federal elections, pushing the already ongoing political mainstreaming and normalization process of the far right even further…
Post-pandemic far-right extremism: A fifth wave?
Taking stock of all these post-pandemic events, actors, and movements, it becomes clear that Belgium — and Flanders in particular — is struggling with more than just a far-right extremist uptick: Now that alt-right actors have infiltrated mainstream politics and the Flemish conservative right is tempted to team up with the far right, the political landscape seems to have irreversibly changed. Only time will tell whether these changes will lead to a potentially local fifth far-right wave normalizing anti-establishment political actors in such a way that they too become part of the political scenery and are given the executive political power alter it for good…
¹ Although the label ‘radical right’ is often used as well, local experts, such as Bruno Verlaeckt and Vincent Scheltiens (Extreemrechts [The Extreme Right], 2021) argue that Vlaams Belang should be labeled as a right-extremist party because of its anti-democratic nature. They support this claim by the fact that Vlaams Belang’s political predecessor, Vlaams Blok [Flemish Bloc], was found guilty of violating Belgium’s anti-racism laws in 2004.
² While Hawley (2017) sketches a broader picture of the rise of the alt-right in conjunction with the 2016 American presidential elections, Jacobs (2021) zooms in on more local manifestations of the Dutch and Flemish alt-right’s gender and sexual politics. Both thinkers neatly underline how the alt-right — now a global movement, united by a distinct hatred for “multiculturalism, immigration, feminism and, above all, political correctness” (NPR, 2016, n. p.) — has slowly but surely been gaining political traction through metapolitical actions.
³ This has recently been demonstrated by the publication of Filip Dewinter’s Omvolking [The Replacement of a Population]. With this book — which very clearly refers to the so-called German National-Socialist ‘Umvolkung’ process — Vlaams Belang’s Flemish Parliament representative shows that the party still wishes to divide the country into first-class and second-class citizens on the basis of a blood-and-soil-rooted politics, assisted by creating fear about the alleged ‘Great Replacement’ or the conspiratorial white nationalist theory that claims that non-white — mainly Muslim — peoples are currently replacing the ‘original’ European population, assisted by the so-called ‘Jewish elites’.
Evelien Geerts (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz) is a multidisciplinary philosopher, University of Birmingham Research Fellow, and Posthumanities Hub affiliate. She is currently part of the ERC-project Urban Terrorism in Europe (2004–19): Remembering, Imagining, and Anticipating Violence and tends to work on the interconnected political philosophical questions of identity, difference, violence, and democracy.
