BANNON'S MISSION TO WEAKEN EU
As Sweden swings Right, Steve Bannon’s antiEU crusade looks north, report Mark Bendeich and Crispian Balmer, of Reuters.
HAVING found an ally in the south and an admirer in the east, Donald Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon is now looking north for recruits in his crusade to undermine the European Union.
And he believes the timing is perfect after famously liberal Sweden voted in record numbers earlier this month for a farRight party that wants a referendum on leaving the 28nation bloc.
Bannon, who helped put United States President Donald Trump in the White House, wants to pull off a similar antiestablishment revolution in the EU and get eurosceptics from all corners of the union voted into the European Parliament at elections next year.
He has already signed up Italy’s most prominent eurosceptic leader, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, to the cause and his project has been praised by another fierce EU critic, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Bannon is now turning to the EU’s northern member states, where his latest admirer is Dutch nationalist Geert Wilders.
‘‘Sometimes you need a catalyst,’’ Wilders told Reuters at the recent annual Ambrosetti Forum conference on the shores of Italy’s Lake Como, where he called for the abolition of the EU.
‘‘Any initiative that comes from [Bannon] is of course to be applauded,’’ he said.
Wilders, who leads his country’s secondlargest party, said he planned to meet Bannon for dinner in the Netherlands soon to discuss the idea of a united eurosceptic front.
Bannon calls his project The Movement, a political startup with 15 staff and an enormous ambition: to persuade the continent’s eurosceptic leaders to mount a coordinated campaign in elections for the European Parliament in May.
He wants the populists to topple what he sees as the EU’s liberal establishment and force Brussels to hand back powers to nation states — an outcome EU supporters say would sound the death knell for Europe’s political and monetary unions.
But Bannon says this is not the ultimate aim.
‘‘I don’t think this drive is for the destruction of the European Union,’’ he told Reuters in Rome last week.
Instead, Bannon’s Movement aims to stack the EU parliament in Strasbourg with parties that can agree on four things: more sovereign rights for EU states, stronger borders, less migration and the eradication from Europe of what it calls radical Islam.
‘‘It is a club, a loose affiliation,’’ Bannon said, stressing that racist and antiSemitic parties were not welcome.
‘‘We have spoken to these populist nationalist parties around Europe and one of the things they say to us is that they never get the chance to talk together. They feel alone.’’
Mission impossible?
The Movement aims to serve as a campaign centre, conducting polling and data analysis, offering strategic advice and deploying social media campaigns to mobilise the antiEU vote for European elections with historically low turnouts.