The Manhunt Dividing Belgium
13th June 2021
Belgium’s leading virologist is in hiding, holed up with his family in a government safe house. The reason? A right-wing Flemish soldier. Jürgen Conings disappeared from his home on May 17, leaving behind a booby-trapped car and a series of letters laying out his grievances against ‘the regime’. In a goodbye letter to his partner, Conings wrote:
‘The so-called political elite, joined now by the virologists, are deciding how you and I should live…I don’t care whether I die or not, but I will live my last days the way I want.’
The muscular 5’9” former corporal is now officially a grade-4 terror risk. But that hasn’t stopped the emergence of pro-Conings groups in Flanders, the richer, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. A Facebook group called ‘I love Jürgen Conings’ grew to 50,000 members before being taken down.
As the hunt for Conings intensifies, several hundred protesters have held sympathetic demonstrations.
The current situation sounds like the rise of terrorist anarchist groups in the decades leading up to World War I. Political ideology in Belgium is so fragmented that it is proving increasingly difficult to find any political party (or combination of parties) that can provide a stable government, a direct result of the ‘proportional representation’ system popular in continental Europe.