‘EU Capital’ Official Normalizes “Rotten Areas”
1st September 2025
“These incidents do not occur where international officials live and work. They happen in the rotten areas of the city, in Anderlecht, in Molenbeek, in places like that,” Alain Hutchinson, Brussels’ commissioner for Europe and international organizations said in a recent interview, downplaying the wave of violence hitting the Belgian capital. He even claimed that in the European quarter, “we have never had this kind of problem” and that expats “have nothing to worry about.”
However, that discourse, intended to reassure the thousands of EU officials living in Brussels, apart from showing complete disregard for ordinary people, clashes head-on with the official data. Far from being confined to a handful of neighborhoods, violence is spreading across the city and has reached levels more akin to a town at war: since January, there have been 57 shootings, 20 of them in just three summer months.
The offensive classism draws a clear line between the lives of European officials and those of ordinary citizens who must learn to live with the increasingly deteriorating security situation in ‘the capital of Europe.’