New Year’s Eve is meant to mark renewal. Across much of Europe this year, it instead exposed a reality that political leaders strive to conceal. From Brussels to Amsterdam, from Strasbourg to Berlin, from French suburbs to Italian cities, the transition into the new year followed a familiar pattern: Fires, riots, attacks on emergency services, and neighbourhoods effectively surrendered to mobsters -in their overwhelming majority Muslim immigrants.
This was not at all some random occurrence of disorder. It was definitely not “youth excess”. It was not a fireworks problem by any means. Rather, it was the predictable outcome of mass immigration combined with failed integration, cultural fragmentation, and a political refusal to confront the role of Islam in shaping parallel social ethos.
In Brussels, unrest erupted from districts long identified by police as high-risk during major public events -areas with immigrant and Muslim populations. Homes and businesses were attacked, more than 150 arrests were made, dozens of cars were burned, and firefighters were pelted with stones and incendiaries while responding to arson. Morocco’s success in the Africa Cup of Nations sparked the fire. A foreign national victory triggered not celebration, but the assertion of territorial dominance.
Police had anticipated trouble, deployed additional units, and still lost control. The issue is not football, of course. It is the absence of loyalty to the host society, the normalisation of hostility toward police, and the use of public space as a stage for flexing identity rather than embracing citizenship. And this is taking place all around the EU.
In Amsterdam, during a night marked by widespread violence and hundreds of arrests nationwide, the Vondelkerk, a 19th-century Christian landmark, was engulfed in flames and effectively destroyed. The fire broke out amid heavy illegal fireworks use and repeated assaults on police and emergency services. What was once a Christian symbol was lost during a night of lawlessness driven by groups with no attachment to Europe’s cultural inheritance.
Across France, more than a thousand vehicles were torched nationwide. New Year’s Eve violence has become a ritual. In suburbs dominated by immigrant populations, the authority of the state is contested annually. In Strasbourg, police faced coordinated attacks using fireworks and projectiles in districts already associated with chronic unrest. Officials spoke of “limited disturbances,” as if repetition has somehow rendered the phenomenon acceptable.
Germany saw similar chaos. In Berlin, Hamburg and the Ruhr, police and firefighters were targeted with illegal fireworks at close range. Police unions admitted that neighbourhoods all across the country became no-go zones for emergency services during peak hours. Most of this violence was concentrated in areas with high levels of immigration and long-standing integration failure, particularly among Muslim young men socialised outside German civic norms.
Italy, often regarded as more resilient, was not immune either. Quite the opposite. In Milan, Turin, Rome, Naples, even in Florence, police broke up violent gatherings, while officers were attacked with fireworks. While the scale was smaller, the profile remains familiar: Young men from immigrant backgrounds asserting themselves against public authority in moments of mass anonymity.
The common denominator across Europe is not poverty, neither fireworks, nor celebration. It is a parallel society shaped by immigration and reinforced by Islamic cultural distance from European norms. In these environments, the state is viewed as the enemy, police are seen as adversaries and public space is treated as contested territory rather than shared inheritance.
Even in capitals like Athens, where public order was not severely disrupted, festivities were completely hijacked by the presence of immigrant communities. Pakistanis flooded Syntagma. No room for ordinary Greeks, no room for families, let alone groups of girls or individual women. Just exclusion in a background of artists performing for invaders, while the indigenous population pays for the show.
This is not a phenomenon which occurred by accident. Europe has been importing aggressors by the millions without demanding assimilation. On the contrary, it is encouraging multiculturalism without protecting the dominant culture and traditions. Even worse, it is treating Islam as a private religious matter, even when it clearly shapes public behaviour. So, yes, all the elements of a perfect storm are there.
Fireworks bans, curfews, and emergency deployments are mere bandages in the face of a strategic failure. They do nothing to address the deeper problem: Europe is now a continent that has lost confidence in its right to impose its own rules, defend its symbols, and demand that any newcomers must adapt to the western values and practices.
The fires are signals. As aggressive mobs set the tone, institutions retreat and citizens hide indoors. A society that cannot protect its firefighters, its monuments, or its streets on New Year’s Eve is not facing a policing problem. It is facing a civilisational issue. We are witnessing our historical decline one burned car, one injured first responder, one assaulted girl, one lost church at a time.
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