European Parliament bans far-right politician’s SA exhibition

A September exhibition in the European Parliament exposing the “mismanagement of the South African government and the fate of the Boer in the ‘rainbow republic’” was banned at the last minute by Parliament officials, according to the organiser’s posts on social media.

Tom Vandendriessche, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Belgium’s far-right Vlaams Belang party, had planned to stage a 13-panel exhibition titled “South Africa at Crossroads” inside the European Parliament in Brussels in the week of 7 September.

The exhibition, according to pictures posted by Vandendriessche on X, consisted of 13 panels displaying information on what the European Parliament’s far-right caucus Patriots for Europe termed “the deteriorating social and economic atmosphere in South Africa and the role of European support and funding to the ANC regime”.

Patriots for Europe also referred to South Africa, now more than two years into rule by a Government of National Unity, as a “de facto one-party state” displaying “a vengeful policy towards the white population”.

An excerpt of the ruling by the European Parliament explaining the decision to block the exhibition, posted by Vandendriessche on X, said that officials “raised a number of concerns regarding the content of the exhibition, the statistical data presented, the lack of historical context in the information provided, and the potential negative impact on relations between the EU and South Africa”.

It added that there were further concerns about “the potential impact of the exhibition on the [local government] elections to be held in South Africa in November 2026”.

What the exhibition claimed

Vandendriessche posted pictures of eight of the 13 panels making up the exhibition, featuring headlines such as “Rape capital of the world” and “Illiterate children” alongside statistics.

Daily Maverick’s fact-check of the claims in the panels revealed real statistics deployed alongside selective context, conflation, and in some cases demonstrably inaccurate claims – all producing a substantially more alarming political narrative than the underlying sources support.

The panel on farm attacks, for instance, claims that 62% of victims between 2019 and 2022 were reported by AfriForum to be “white men”, but the AfriForum report it relies on does not make this claim. 

The claim that “81% of children under 10 cannot read” in South Africa is also misleading. While the 2021 Progress in International Literacy Study did find that 81% of Grade 4 learners could not reach the Low International Benchmark, the phrase “illiterate children” is exaggerated.

Vandendriessche wrote on X that he was initially asked to remove four of the panels. One read simply: “SOUTH AFRICA: Murder. Rape. Racism”, with three decontextualised figures for each category.

Another asked: “Corruption and mismanagement funded by the EU?”, but provided no evidence that EU funding to South Africa was misused or stolen.

This is not the first time that Vandendriessche has criticised EU financial support for South Africa. In March 2025, he co-signed a European Parliamentary question attacking the EU’s €4.7-billion Global Gateway package for South Africa, asking how the commission could justify “support for a regime that allows racial hatred”.

Vandendriessche, in an interview with the Afrikaner Volksparty this week, said that the inspiration for the exhibition came from a meeting with Solidarity’s Jaco Kleynhans in 2025.

“The stories and figures Jaco cited were quite simply outrageous,” the English translation of his words read.

Kleynhans told Daily Maverick on Wednesday: “I have known Tom for years and am very pleased that my past conversations with him inspired his highly appropriate, fact-based exhibition.”

Kleynhans said that he had seen the exhibition beforehand and considered it “a 100% accurate reflection of the failing state South Africa is becoming”.

He told Daily Maverick last year that Solidarity was undertaking lobbying to “make a serious plea” to the EU that “South Africa should not be [economically] punished”.

Yet it would appear that his own briefing to the likes of Vandendriessche is being used as the basis for a campaign aimed in part at questioning EU financial support for South Africa.

Vandendriessche’s Vlaams Belang party revealed in a statement that to compensate for the banning of the exhibition, it had organised a “conference on South African policy and the censorship surrounding it” in the European Parliament in the week of the intended exhibition, which it promised Kleynhans would attend.

Kleynhans confirmed that he had addressed the conference on what he said was his third such visit to Europe in 2026.

He added: “Our outreach, which was long confined to the USA and Europe, is also extending to Latin America and numerous African countries, where we are currently actively engaging and forging relationships”. 

‘Everything that isn’t far left is far right’

On 2 October, Kleynhans’ former colleague Ernst Roets – now carrying out his own international lobbying under his outfit Lex Libertas – tweeted in response to a CNN report: “Everything that isn’t far left is far right to them”.

This is a common refrain on the right: that liberal media now unjustly labels ideas and policies once merely considered conservative as “far right”.

Yet to use an alternative term to describe the politics of Vandendriessche would seem inaccurate, because the politician occupies the hard edge of even Belgium’s nationalist right.

“Heavy flirtation with Nazism permeates the entirety of Vandendriessche’s political career,” reported the Brussels Times in 2024, adding that Vandendriessche had been accused of misusing European funds on numerous occasions.

The news outlet drew on an investigation carried out by Belgian magazine Humo, writing:

“[Vandendriessche] was also a member of the Flemish Nationalist Student Association (NSV) but was expelled for extremism, anti-Semitism and a fascination with Nazism. ‘We were no wimps at the NSV, but there were limits,’ ex-Vlaams Belang member Michael de Bronett told Humo. ‘In my entire career, I have shown three people the door because of extremist views. Tom Vandendriessche was one of them. He was an unadulterated Hitler fanatic’.”

Vandendriessche also came under fire in July 2023 for publishing a photograph of himself in the European Parliament making a White Power symbol with his hands. 

“The allegations against Tom are completely devoid of truth,” Kleynhans told Daily Maverick. “Solidarity and all our affiliated organisations would never associate or even meet with any person or party involved in Neo-Nazism or similar extremist ideologies.”

As Daily Maverick has previously reported, the South African groups currently campaigning internationally around Afrikaner interests are finding some of their most receptive allies in controversial figures on the far right abroad. DM