Populists Scoring 30% in EU Vote Would Boost Trump, Bannon Says

(Bloomberg) -- If populists obtain more than 30% of the vote in this month’s elections for the European Parliament, it will give a boost to Donald Trump’s re-election effort, said Steve Bannon, a former top adviser to the U.S. president, in an interview with daily newspaper Le Parisien.

The vote’s outcome will be particularly crucial in France, where the parliamentary elections are essentially a referendum on President Emmanuel Macron and “his vision for Europe,” Bannon said in the interview from Paris. Bannon, who has spent recent months in Europe trying to build a nationalist coalition, describes himself as an informal adviser to populist parties.

Macron’s party and Le Pen’s EU-skeptic National Rally are running neck-and-neck in French polls ahead of the European elections. Le Pen’s party would get 23.5% of the French vote while Macron’s Republic on the Move/MoDem group would get 22.5%, according to a Harris poll published Saturday in Le Figaro.

Bannon has set up a Brussels-based organization called The Movement to provide polling support to populist parties that favor national sovereignty and immigration curbs.

To contact the reporter on this story: Fabio Benedetti-Valentini in Paris at fabiobv@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Dale Crofts at dcrofts@bloomberg.net, Brian Wingfield, Andrew Davis

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