As Ursula von der Leyen sweet-talked and bullied EU leaders to send more women to Brussels over recent weeks, I kept hoping she would also make her incoming team of European commissioners more racially diverse. Thanks to an unexpected twist of fate involving (very) complicated Belgian politics, Hadja Lahbib, Belgium’s foreign minister, could soon make history as the first ever EU commissioner who is also a person of colour.
Lahbib is the daughter of Algerian immigrants who was born and grew up in the Borinage, a coal-mining and industrial region in southwestern Belgium. She must yet, like other commissioners-designate, convince the European parliament that despite some past political mishaps, she’s got what it takes to become the EU commissioner for crisis management and equality, the two – rather unrelated – portfolios she has been assigned. So it is not a done deal yet.
If she gets the parliamentary thumbs up, Lahbib and the incoming EU Council president, Portugal’s former prime minister António Costa, who is of Goan and Mozambican heritage, will give a much-needed reputational tweak to an EU that boasts about being “united in diversity” but whose institutions still keep no data on their staff’s ethnicity and are visibly and notoriously “all-white”.
But it is far from enough. Making EU institutions truly inclusive is not about changing the optics or accidental, albeit fortuitous, political appointments. It is not about tokenism and diversity washing. Having tracked the systemic underrepresentation of racial minorities and structural racism within EU institutions, I know that change requires revising staff recruitment policies and eliminating outdated anti-diversity mindsets. None of that can happen unless senior EU policymakers give racial inclusion the same attention that they are, quite correctly, paying to gender equality and, more recently, to welcoming LGBTQ+ people.
Blueprints like the commission’s “diversity and inclusion in the workplace action plan” and the five-year anti-racism action plan until 2025 need much stronger support from Von der Leyen and her team. But as with countering EU-wide racism, such top-tier backing is missing. It isn’t going to get easier as both the commission and the European parliament swerve even further to the political right – and xenophobic views percolate through the system.
The parliament, whose record on representing racial minorities has always been dismal, now counts only 20 MEPs of colour, equivalent to 2.8% of the overall total of 720 newly elected MEPs. That is down from 3.8% last time around – and when you consider the fact that people of colour make up at least 10% of EU citizens, it makes a mockery of the EU parliament’s claim to be the voice of European citizens.
Mohammed Chahim, a Moroccan-Dutch MEP who is vice president of the assembly’s socialists and democrats group, tells me that is not only because European political parties do not field black and brown candidates – but also because many people of colour are just not interested in becoming part of an EU ecosystem that is so clearly indifferent to their concerns. This is backed up by a recent study from the European personnel selection office that acknowledges one of the “blocking factors” stopping people of colour from applying for EU jobs. In the words of one participant, “I don’t feel welcome if I don’t see people like me working there”. Others accuse EU institutions of “elitism” and “stereotypical perceptions, prejudice, bias, and discrimination in the workplace”, including bullying.
Rima Hassan, a French-Palestinian MEP from La France Insoumise, who was ordered to remove her traditional Palestinian black and white keffiyeh scarf in the European parliament, also tells me representation matters. She says: “just like you can’t talk about gender equality without having women in the room, you cannot fight racism without giving a voice to people who are concerned”. Yet unless more MEPs make racial equality a priority, there is concern that an anti-racism and diversity intergroup (Ardi) within the European parliament may not get the membership and backing it needs to be extended for another five years.
I am hoping that Lahbib will use her own experience as a person of colour to re-energise the EU’s flagging anti-racism agenda. Encouragingly, she has admitted that despite an initial reluctance to see herself as a role model or standard bearer for equality, she now understands that her success means a “lot for a community where people don’t have the same opportunities and where people have a name like mine, which is difficult to pronounce.”
Lahbib will need a very thick skin to deal with commission bureaucracy and the mainstreaming and normalisation of racist narratives in the European parliament. Von der Leyen has not exactly killed off the equality agenda, but anti-racism action has been downgraded and diluted by combining it with the monumental task of managing the EU’s humanitarian operations, including responding to wars and natural disasters.
Worryingly, Lahbib’s mandate does not specifically mention the need to counter anti-Muslim hatred or antisemitism, which will be dealt with by Austria’s Magnus Brunner, who is commissioner-designate for internal affairs and migration. Not only is the Austrian People’s party which Brunner belongs to hostile to migrants it feels do not share “Austrian values”, it may end up in coalition government with the anti-Islam far-right Freedom party after its historic electoral victory last week.
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Helena Dalli, the outgoing EU commissioner for equality, tells me she spends “many sleepless nights” thinking about the EU’s racism problem and has tried to make sure that EU institutions become more inclusive employers. The job now falls to Lahbib, but unless Von der Leyen and the parliament play their roles, structural racism will persist. EU institutions won’t lose their “Brussels so white” profile without action. The risk is they remain disconnected from and unrepresentative of a diverse and vibrant multiracial Europe at a time when dangerous far-right ideas are being normalised by the political mainstream.
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Shada Islam is a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company.
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