European Parliament votes 381-167 to pursue Brotherhood listings it cannot order

The Parliament adopted the text on Thursday 8 October, a day after the plenary debate, by 381 votes to 167 with 15 abstentions — a figure carried identically by Brussels Signal, The National, Algemeiner and Kurdistan24. The ten-page resolution was drafted by the European People’s Party and written by the French MEP Céline Imart of Les Républicains. It asks member-state capitals to pool information on the Brotherhood’s leadership and affiliated bodies so the Council can assess whether they meet EU terrorist-listing criteria; asks the Commission for a comprehensive overview of EU funds delivered to entities suspected of Brotherhood links; and calls for stricter oversight of foreign funding, naming actors linked to Qatar and Turkey, alongside closer work between member states, Europol and Eurojust. “Where rules allow, the Council should list individuals and organisations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist entities,” Imart told The National on 9 October.

The resolution is non-binding and names no one for designation: the EU terrorist list is set by the Council, representing member states, under a separate legal framework — a distinction that several outlets covering the vote, including the European Jewish Press and Middle East Forum, did not preserve. Socialists, Greens and the left voted against, and Civic Space Watch, a Brussels civic-freedoms tracker, described the winning coalition as an alliance of the far right, the EPP and Renew, warning the text “could discredit, defund, and censor civil society.” A coalition of NGOs, its statement hosted on the site of FEMYSO — itself named in the text, per Middle East Forum’s reading, alongside the European Network Against Racism, Al Sharq Forum and Islamic Relief Worldwide — called the resolution “a new high of Islamophobic attacks on civil society.” Middle East Eye, which opposes the measure, characterised it as linking youth and activist groups to the Brotherhood without evidence.

Assessment: The vote’s authority is rhetorical. France’s National Assembly passed its own non-binding resolution in January urging exactly this, and French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez has since said Paris prefers to act case by case rather than through blanket designation — the state that opened the European push declining the instrument its own MEP is now demanding. Two things settle whether this week mattered: whether any capital puts the file on a Council agenda, and whether the Commission commits to the funding audit. Neither has happened. Watch also the roll-call, still unreported: 167 against and 15 abstentions out of 563 votes cast means national delegations inside the EPP and Renew split, and the shape of that split predicts the Council’s appetite better than the headline margin.