Populists of Europe, unite — in suburban Brussels!
That’s what an unlikely pair — a Belgian lawyer and Donald Trump’s former chief strategist — hope will happen with The Movement, the first ever “club” for Euroskeptics and populists.
“We are building a club that will bring people together, whose members we will help … like brothers in arms,” Mischaël Modrikamen said in an interview in the living room of his home in the residential district of Watermael-Boitsfort, in the south of the Belgian capital. “And if a brother in arms needs help, the club will be there to lend a hand.”
Cigar-smoking lawyer Modrikamen launched the far-right Parti Populaire in Belgium in 2009, and set up The Movement in 2016. Few noticed until this year when he joined forces with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon to turn The Movement into a foundation to support right-wing, anti-establishment groups across Europe and serve as a central source of polling, messaging advice, data targeting and think-tank research.
Bannon and Modrikamen said in separate interviews that the success of populist parties in Italy and Austria, and an expected far-right surge in next year’s European Parliament election, had encouraged them to form the club.
“Some people say ‘well, they already have that,'” Bannon told POLITICO in an interview in Rome. “When these people, the [French] Front National [now the National Rally], the Swiss People’s Party, in the Czech Republic, started to invite me to speak, I asked them: ‘Hey, what would you like to be in the speech? What would you like to accomplish?’ And every party said the same thing: ‘Tell us we’re not alone.'”
For now, The Movement is financed mostly from Bannon’s own pockets and European donors. There are seven or eight people working from Modrikamen’s home, and the Belgian said he would like to add “three to four full-time people” in Brussels.
Once the club has enough members, Modrikamen plans to organize informal and formal gatherings at his spacious home, using it for meetings of Euroskeptic leaders ahead of EU summits. He also wants to hold a “summit of Euroskeptic leaders,” which he said could take place “in November or January.”
So far, Italy’s interior minister and head of the co-governing League party, Matteo Salvini, has said publicly he would join The Movement, as has Giorgia Meloni of the far-right Brothers of Italy. Italy is the “center of the political universe,” Bannon said.
Not everyone’s so keen, both inside and out of the populist camp.
“There are differences among us and these will be maybe stronger in a potential future Euroskeptic front,” said Marco Zanni, an MEP from Italy’s League. “But there are differences in all the groups, and making this front more homogenous can be destructive.”
Sophie In’t Veld, a Liberal Dutch MEP, said many politicians are “concerned” at how Euroskeptics are getting organized. “Nationalistic parties are pretty good at working together, very closely, [while] pro-European forces are scattered,” she said.
“He’s an interesting person of course, but it’s not anyone that we’ve added to our current schedule,” Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the fast-growing far-right Sweden Democrats told Bloomberg earlier this year. “I don’t see any possibility of meeting him near-term.”
Åkesson was responding to Bannon telling Dagens Nyheter that he thinks “the Sweden Democrats are a lesson for the whole world.”
In the search for support, Bannon and Modrikamen have been touring Europe, including a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. “We’re going to see the Danes, we’re going to see the True Finns,” Modrikamen said. “There are a lot of people who are more mainstream and who are not far from our convictions, like [Austrian Chancellor] Sebastian Kurz and also [Spanish Popular Party leader] Pablo Casado in Spain,” he said.
In France, Bannon has his eyes on Marion Maréchal, Marine Le Pen’s niece, whom he has described as “an amazing figure,” while Modrikamen said that Raheem Kassam, former London editor of Breitbart, the far-right news site previously headed by Bannon, has reached out to Le Pen’s National Rally.
Worldwide insurgency
Modrikamen is, unsurprisingly, a Trump fan.
The Belgian said that when Trump emerged as a leading presidential candidate, he posted a video of himself on YouTube, addressing the American directly. “Mr. Trump,” he says in the clip, “we have this in common; we speak the truth, we name things. Make America great again, you are an example for us in Europe.”
After Trump’s election, Modrikamen said he asked Brexiteer Nigel Farage to pass along a one-page memo to the U.S. administration. “I told them: There has been Brexit, there is Trump, the populist insurgency is worldwide, this movement is going to be worldwide, we must organize it worldwide.”
Bannon and Modrikamen said they intend to form a new populist group in the European Parliament after the election in May 2019.
They don’t advocate countries breaking from the EU or ditching the euro currency (at least not yet), but say more power should be handed back from Brussels to national capitals.
“If you look at countries with sovereignty … Switzerland, the U.K., Norway … they’ve all got their own central bank,” Bannon said. “But the whole euro and the implementation of it was so complicated that unwinding that …”
Bannon confessed he had “no idea” what the European Parliament even was until he saw YouTube videos featuring “amazing” speeches by Farage.
“Everything here in Europe is different,” Bannon said. “Honestly, our target has been not to get too far ahead of it, but get 33 percent [of the votes] … you know, kind of a blocking minority.”
Bannon said he is focused on turning The Movement into an “infrastructure of victory,” with a polling operation, data analytics and “hiring firms that will do the analytics for targeting.” The Movement should provide “the technical ability to do war rooms, rapid response — which is a fairly rudimentary element right now,” he said.
Beyond that, he wants to go further still and unite “left-wing populists and right-wing nationalists.” On his Rome trip, he reached out to Luigi Di Maio, leader of the 5Star Movement, about joining The Movement.
“Throughout the entire world, you will not find two politicians that worked as hard as Salvini and Di Maio, for no money, leading their parties to these unbelievable victories and then stepped back and let someone else be the guy that goes to the G7, G20 and sits in the Oval Office with Trump … Nobody would do that,” said Bannon, referring to the fact that the country’s prime minister is Giuseppe Conte, a former law professor.