The European Parliament has done what Washington has spent the past year pressing its allies to do. It has told Europe’s governments to treat the Muslim Brotherhood as a security problem instead of a foreign-policy curiosity.
On October 8, 2026, lawmakers in Strasbourg adopted a resolution calling for a European Union strategy to counter “Islamist entryism” and urging member states to assess whether people and organizations tied to the Brotherhood belong on the bloc’s terrorist list. The tally was 381 to 167, with 15 abstentions. French lawmaker Céline Imart drafted the text for the center-right European People’s Party, the chamber’s largest group, while the European Conservatives and Reformists lobbied hard for the vote.
The measure carries political weight but no legal force. It obliges no government to act, and no spending decision followed it. Any terrorist listing would need a decision by a national judicial or administrative authority and the unanimous backing of member states in the Council of the European Union. That is where the fight now moves.
The measure carries political weight but no legal force. It obliges no government to act, and no spending decision followed it.
The Trump administration got there first. Its campaign started with a November 2025 executive order, and in January the Treasury and State departments designated the Brotherhood’s Egyptian, Jordanian, and Lebanese branches, accusing them of backing Hamas. The Sudanese branch was added in March 2026.
Treasury then reached into Europe itself, sanctioning British-based activist Zaher Birawi in January and, in July, Mahmoud al-Abyari, whom it identified as secretary-general of the Brotherhood’s General Secretariat, according to a review by counterterrorism scholar Robin Simcox. Birawi rejects the charges, and al-Abyari has dismissed his designation as false.
Paris moved in parallel. After a 2025 government-commissioned report on the Brotherhood’s reach inside France, the National Assembly passed its own resolution in January asking the EU to list the movement. Within days of the Strasbourg vote, Massad Boulos, President Donald Trump’s senior adviser for Arab and African affairs, publicly welcomed it.
European intelligence services have described the Brotherhood’s footprint on the continent for years. A 2023 compilation of public assessments from security services in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden found broad agreement: a secretive, hierarchical inner core, membership kept hidden, and a ring of formally independent mosques, charities, student groups, and youth bodies. The domestic intelligence office in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia calls the strategy “Islamization from below.”
Those same services, however, have stopped short of calling the movement terrorist. No European state has designated it, and the compilation’s author, Lorenzo Vidino, regards it as non-violent though problematic. Even France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, cautioned lawmakers in January that the Brotherhood is not a terrorist movement. The distance between “problematic” and “terrorist” is exactly where the Council will struggle. Terror listings must survive judicial review, and European courts have struck listings before when they rested on press reports rather than decisions by national authorities.
Money is where the text could have its earliest impact. Lawmakers want the Commission to halt grants to Brotherhood-linked groups and to make foreign funding of such groups public. They also single out the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations, a Brussels-based network set up in 1996 that trains young activists and campaigns against anti-Muslim discrimination. The resolution calls for barring the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations from European Union institutional meetings and removing it from the Transparency Register, the European Union’s database of registered lobbyists. The group has long denied any ties to the Brotherhood.
Czech lawmaker Tomáš Zdechovský, the European People’s Party budgetary-control spokesman, stated the demand plainly ahead of the October 8 vote: “We must know who gets EU money, how much, and through which programs.”
In Washington, some analysts see an opening for transatlantic cooperation. One think tank proposal calls for the State and Treasury departments to set up a standing exchange with European authorities on suspect financial flows, leadership and intermediaries.
Resistance came mostly from Social Democrats, Greens and the Left, while the centrist Renew group backed the text. Critics argue the text reaches well past the Brotherhood to Muslim civic and anti-racism organizations more broadly. Maltese Labor lawmaker Alex Agius Saliba argued that although the resolution carries the Brotherhood’s name, its contents extend to a far wider range of Islamic associations. One opinion piece cast the vote as proof that Europe’s center-right is drifting toward the far right on questions involving Muslims.
Europe has spent two decades arguing over whether the Brotherhood is a terrorist movement, a debate the evidence has never settled.
Imart has tried to answer that charge, insisting that faith and political ideology be kept separate. Belgian lawmaker Assita Kanko of the European Conservatives and Reformists bloc made a similar case, arguing that opposing political Islamism protects ordinary Muslims from fundamentalist pressure, rather than targeting them.
Simcox’s advice to European governments starts with intelligence. Each country’s security services, he argues, should work out who belongs to the Brotherhood network at home and pass that picture to their neighbors and to Washington. Charities that act as fronts for Hamas fundraising should be shut down. For the much larger group of activists who break no terrorism laws, he calls for a separate plan to counter their message and recruiting.
That last piece may matter most. Europe has spent two decades arguing over whether the Brotherhood is a terrorist movement, a debate the evidence has never settled. A more answerable question is whether Brotherhood-linked bodies should draw on public money and enjoy privileged access to the institutions they seek to influence.
Strasbourg has given its answer. Whether the 27 governments that control both the purse and the terror list agree to close that door is another matter entirely.
