ATHENS — The inglorious old French expression “les villes du sud puent,” meaning, “cities of the south stink,” may need a petite modification. Parisians in particular have traditionally turned their noses up at any major conurbation south of the Seine, but it is looking more and more like oddball Brussels is the most malodorous city of all. The fumes, which emanate from a variety of sources, cast doubt on the credibility of the European project even as it flirts with expansion.

As the administrative capital of the European Union, Brussels is a city whose heaviest industry is bureaucracy — in terms of swampiness, it gives Washington a run for its money. The latest example has to do with garbage, which is piling up on the streets of the capital to the extent that some of its famous Art Nouveau façades are getting hard to see. This is because of a new rule from Bruxelles-Propreté, the city’s waste collection entity, which stipulates that residents must bring their trash bags only at specific times, indicated by time slots.

Before that bit of administrative derring-do, bags were taken out only when they were going to be picked up. Confusion over the new “garbage bag schedule” has led to Bruxelles-Propreté — whose mission is to “build with you a more serene life in society” — deliberately leaving garbage bags on the streets for up to an additional 48 hours. So despite the fact that there is no shortage of garbage trucks and unlike in France recently nobody is on strike, the garbage just piles up. 

Welcome to Brussels. 

Less effaceable than the rot of thousands of trash bags, though, is the stench of corruption. There has been a lot of that swirling around the EU’s showcase city lately. It comes mainly in two forms: international and domestic. As for the latter, Belgian newspaper Le Soir reports that “serious” financial corruption has reached a record level. 

In 2022 alone, Belgium’s independent financial crimes unit, CTIF, sent 25 new corruption and funds misappropriation case files to the Belgian courts. According to a CTIF statement, “attempts and acts of corruption against persons representing the state are increasingly obvious and require special attention.”

As in America, shady banking in Europe can trigger suspicious activity reports. The cases under investigation at Brussels followed the equivalent of those reports, which flagged likely instances of either money laundering or terrorist financing, or both. While the figures for cases for 2023 are not yet known, based on the uptick of pending cases until this point Belgian prosecutors are going to have a busy year. 

Financial fraud and double-dealing in the heart of Europe has also infiltrated the heart of the EU administrative apparatus. As the Sun has reported, the “Qatargate” graft scandal that erupted last winter implicated dozens of members of the European Parliament, which is the EU’s only institution where delegates are directly elected. Its headquarters is at Strasbourg, but because for Brussels there can never be too much bureaucracy, the body also has a significant presence at Brussels. 

By the end of last year Belgian police had seized $1.6 million in more than a dozen raids around Brussels and Italy. Prosecutors are still investigating links to that money and alleged bribes of European officials by Qatari and Moroccan officials ahead of Qatar’s sponsorship of the FIFA World Cup last year. 

One of the Euro-lawmakers implicated was a Greek socialist MEP, or European parliament member, Eva Kaili, who prior to the World Cup somewhat incredulously lauded Qatar as “a pioneer in labor rights.” Belgian police later found 150,000 euros in cash in her apartment. Following Ms. Kaili’s arrest in December on the charge of being the “primary organizer or co-organizer” of public corruption and money laundering, she was jailed.

Ms. Kaili, who was released from house arrest last month, told the French newspaper Libération in a new interview, “It’s so obvious that I have no role in this case,” and, “Everything I’ve said or done is public, including on Qatar, and I have no possibility of influencing anything whatsoever at the European Parliament.”

She has also been in the hot seat for taking allegedly fraudulent payments involving former European Parliament assistants from 2014 to 2020. She has been stripped of her vice president post in the parliament even though she is still a member of it, reportedly drawing the standard salary of more than $10,000 a month plus benefits. 

Greek newspapers have attempted to portray the telegenic 44-year-old former news presenter and single mother of a toddler daughter in a sympathetic light, but even if Ms. Kaili is completely exonerated her case will be just one downpour in an ongoing storm front. On Monday Le Soir reported that another European parliamentarian, the long-serving Belgian socialist Marie Arena, is now also implicated in Qatargate. But she is still shielded by parliamentary immunity.

Immunity has just been lifted for two other MEPs, who both happen to be Greek: Alexis Georgoulis and Maria Spyrakis. It is not clear whether that has to do with Qatargate too, but in the case of Mr. Georgoulis, it concerns an investigation over what Greek newspaper Iefimerida called “serious criminal offenses.”

Ms. Kaili, for her part, apparently cannot wait to get back to work in time for the European Parliament’s next plenary session in June. No doubt it needs her back urgently to resume vital work on saving the trees and harping on Ukraine over its allegedly  inequitable treatment of gays. 

The Brussels schmutz is pervasive and even extends to the European Commission’s controversial Covid-19 vaccine arrangement with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. The peripatetic European Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, has as little to say about that shady situation as she does about the sea of scandals washing over the European Parliament. 

Sometimes, as in the streets of Brussels right now, the rot just speaks for itself.