The leader of far-right party Vlaams Belang has said in a newspaper interview that a Wuustwezel municipal councillor that laid flowers on the grave of a soldier that had served with Hitler’s Waffen SS has been expelled from the party
In the interview that appeared in today’s edition of the Sunday freesheet ‘De Zondag’ Tom Van Grieken said that Carrera Neefs is no longer a member of Vlaams Belang
Earlier this month a photograph of Ms Neefs laying flowers on the grave of the SS soldier Willem Heubel at a cemetery in The Netherlands appeared on social media
On her own Facebook page Carrera Neefs and in a reference to Remembrance Day wrote above the photograph “I don’t forget these people either”
Mr Van Grieken (photo above) told ‘De Zondag’ that Ms Neefs had “admittedly unintentionally
Initially she didn’t even want to remove her Facebook post
We then asked her to sign the party charter and she didn’t want to do that either
the party’s Executive Committee is of the opinion that her membership should be terminated
The party charter is a document that Vlaams Belang requires all those that respresent it
Ms Neefs had not yet done so as she had been elected as a councillor for the centre-right nationalist party N-VA
The charter always obliges those that have signed up to it tow the party line
"Anyone that won’t sign it in these circumstances puts themself outside the party”
He went on to say that Ms Neefs is not a Neo-Nazi
"I believe her when she says that this wasn’t a political statement
She laid a wreath at the request of relatives
This is ok for me; a person can grieve for someone
politically speaking she handled this clumsily not to say stupidly
This was something that could not be repeated”