Why is Steve Bannon in Europe?

Donald Trump’s former strategist has been touring the continent and attempting to sign parties up to his pan-European populist project. But as the Guardian’s Paul Lewis finds, it is not going completely to plan. Plus: David Conn on preparations for Qatar 2022, the most improbable football World Cup yet

After a spell as Donald Trump’s campaign chair and chief strategist, Steve Bannon was exiled from the White House and went on the hunt for a new political project. In recent months he’s been in Europe, building a Brussels-based operation to help rightwing populist parties.


As part of a major new series, called the new populism, the Guardian’s Paul Lewis describes how his reporting gave him a front-row view of Bannon’s operation in Europe. He tells Anushka Asthana how he followed Bannon on a journey from city to city as he attempted to sign up far-right and populist parties to a common cause in a project he calls the Movement. But European politics are fractured and complex, electoral laws are different across borders and Bannon’s goal of achieving a surge in next year’s European parliamentary elections is proving more difficult than he might have expected.

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