How the European Parliament turned a minute's silence to political mudslinging

Staging a minute's silence in the European Parliament at the start of a plenary session is usually uncontroversial and common practice.

But the refusal of Katarina Barley, a vice-president of the chamber, to let some MEPs hold a minute of silence for Charlie Kirk has sparked uproar among many conservative MEPs, including inside the European People’s party. Kirk, an American political activist was shot in the neck on Wednesday while he was speaking on a Utah college campus and died at the hospital soon after.

Many blame Barley, a socialist MEP and other left-wing MEPs for having politicised a random exercise and hiding behind rules to boycott political figures they dislike.  

“There are people we want to commemorate that are important for our political group and the others should accept it,” said Kosma Złotowski, a Polish MEP from the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), whose group initiated the minute of silence for Kirk. “We accept people from the left, they should accept people from the right.” 

On Thursday, the Parliament denied Charlie Weimers, a Swedish right-wing member of the European Parliament, from holding a minute of silence to honor Kirk. “Well, we have discussed this and the president said no to a minute of silence,” Barley told Weimers in the hemicycle. Videos on social media showed Weimer’s supporters standing up and booing Barley.

Several socialist MEPs contacted by Euronews refused to comment on Kirk’s minute of silence. But they insisted they would stand behind parliament rules and decisions made by Metsola, “who by the way is a member of the conservative EPP,” one of them said.

Barley's refusal drew the ire of Weimers himself and many other members of his political group, who pointed to a 2020 minute of silence at the Parliament granted to Georges Floyd, the black American man whose murder by a police officer sparked deep political divisions around the issues of police brutality and racial injustice.

Under parliament rules, minutes of silence are announced by the Parliament president at the opening of the plenary session and must be requested by political groups prior to the opening. Some officials say they had never encountered cases of MEPs requesting a minute of silence in the middle of a plenary.  

Few in the EPP, the largest group in the parliament, openly reacted to the uproar. But some MEPs defended the ECR push to commemorate Kirk in the parliament.  

Miriam Lexmann, an MEP from the EPP and another quaestor confirmed that “commemorations can only be held at the opening of the plenary,” so “the minutes of silence could not have been observed this week.” 

But Lexmann also said she would support another request for a minute of silence “to honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy of dialogue.”

“His assassination is a mark of exclamation as we witness more and more extreme positions and hatred towards Christians and conservatives in the EU, not excluding the European Parliament,” Lexman said.

Earlier this week, Metsola opened the plenary with a minute of silence to Andrii Parubii, a prominent Ukrainian politician and former parliamentary speaker who was shot and killed in the western city of Lviv two weeks ago. Nobody in the chamber opposed the commemoration.

All MEPs also stood up in silence to remember the victims of the derailment of the funicular "Elevador da Glória" in Lisbon on 3 September, of the wildfires across Europe and of the Gaza war.