Bannon stirs the pot as voting starts in crucial European election by melissarossi199
BARCELONA — Amid the ongoing political crisis turned soap opera sweeping Europe as elections approach to choose delegates to the EU Parliament, French President Emmanuel Macron minced no words about President Trump’s former main man Steve Bannon, who showed up in Paris to cheer on Marine Le Pen and her hard-right National Rally party.
In the voting that runs from Thursday to Sunday, citizens of 28 countries will choose 751 delegates to serve five-year terms in the European Parliament in Brussels. At stake is whether the 25-year-old EU will grow even more entwined, as Macron envisions, or give more power to its individual member countries, a position that Le Pen favors, along with over a dozen European nationalist-populist “sovereigntist” parties that Bannon has been unofficially advising over the past year.
Bannon predicts Le Pen’s National Rally, currently leading Macron’s Renaissance party by a hair, will win a plurality of the French delegates to the EU Parliament. And across the continent, he says, nationalist-populist parties will take more than 30 percent of seats, and when Parliament convenes in July they will vote as a bloc to block passage of budgets, legislation and key appointments to the upper political echelons of the EU.But France is only one country that appears rocky this week.
Beyond Le Pen’s party and the anti-Islamic Party of Freedom of Dutchman Geert Wilders, another eight hard-right parties had signed on to Salvini’s new European Alliance of People and Nations. That includes the infamous Conservative People’s Party of Estonia , an ethno-nationalist party headed by that country’s former ambassador to Russia, Mart Helme, and his son, Martin.
And while professing to be a staunch Catholic, Salvini has yet to meet with Pope Francis. He has been photographed holding up a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Benedict is my pope,” referring to the last pope, Benedict XVI, a traditionalist in contrast to Francis, who has emphasized the duty of charity toward migrants and the poor.
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