Last Wednesday, I purposefully moved into the lion’s den. As someone who is used to ask all the tough questions about the EU,I expected to manifestly throw myself into quite an adventure when I decided to cover a ‘Stop Brexit’ march in Luxembourg-City. Little did I know that the excitement to stop this democratic vote wasn’t all that large. Upon arrival, the first people who arrived weren’t even organisers, which made that at 4.00 pm, when the march was supposed to start, you had just as many journalists present as there were protesters.
If all of these dynamic protestors would have come into the restaurant at the same time, the waiter would have been “Yeah that’s fine. There are still some tables in the back.”.
As I was walking together with these convinced Europeans, it struck me that approximately half of them worked for EU institutions, giving them a vested interest of the UK remaining in the union. Apart from these eurocrats, all protesters agreed that Brexiteers were uninformed, yet failed to know basic facts about the EU.
One man stated that the Leave campaign was solely fuelled by fascism. Not surprising coming from participants of this event, as the event description on social media claimed the following:
“Let’s keep this simple, Brexit had nothing to do with the British economy. It had nothing to do with control over laws and borders that we had never lost, it is all about narrow minded, isolationist, xenophobic nationalism cloaked in the delusion and grandeur of an empire long gone.”
I conducted several interviews while on this march. You can listen to the full segment on my SoundCloud down below:
Brexit has become an unpreventable reality, that even its opponents need to accept. Now is the time to work for the initial ideals of the EU by fostering free trade, even for those who are not members.