The European Commission slammed a Belgian street parade for featuring antisemitic floats that it said were “incompatible” with EU values.
The Aalst carnival, a centuries-old event in central Belgium long known for mocking public figures, has in recent years been accused of parading insulting and derogatory depictions of Jews.
The parade included caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, obsessed with money and dressed up like insects.
“It should indeed be self-evident that such images as what we’ve seen should not parade European streets, 75 years after the Shoah,” a Commission spokesman, Adalbert Jahnz, told journalists.
He said the European Union executive had received “a number of complaints” over the Aalst event, but that it was up to Belgian national authorities to take action.
As far as the European Commission was concerned, Jahnz said, “we stand firmly against all forms of antisemitism” and view the parade’s floats as “incompatible with the values and principles in which the EU is founded.”
Commission vice-president Margaritis Schinas said the Aalst carnival was a “shame.”
“It needs to stop. No place for this in Europe,” Schinas wrote on Twitter.
The carnival attracts tens of thousands of people over the three days leading to the Catholic holiday of Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. It takes pride in its provocative, no-holds-barred approach.
Aalst mayor Christoph D’Haese defended the event, insisting it was not antisemitic.
He said it was important to take the “overall context” into account, comparing the parade to a “ritual of reversal” in which, over three days, “the poor become rich, the rich poor, men become women, and women become men.”
“Here, we laugh at everything — the royal family, Brexit, local and national politics, and every religion — Islam, Judaism and Catholicism,” he said.
A float depicting puppets of hook-nosed Orthodox Jews with rats sitting on money bags at the 2019 carnival caused uproar and led to UNESCO withdrawing it from its “intangible cultural heritage” list.
