After he spiraled out of Donald Trump’s orbit, Steve Bannon vowed to take the populist revolution abroad, with his own rumbled personage as the tip of the spear. “All I’m trying to be is the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement,” he told The New York Times last March. With this humble endeavor in mind, he decamped to Europe for a fresh start, enlisting Belgian lawyer Mischaël Modrikamen to help him launch “the Movement”—an informal salon whose aim was to help the leaders of Europe’s own Trumpian parties to coordinate their political efforts. The results, he promised, would be earth-shattering: “Europe’s going to see an intensity and focus among the voters and the media that what is happening is basically going to be a continent-wide presidential election,” he gushed last September.

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How’s that going? Evidently, not so well. According to a Politico report, Bannon doesn’t seem to be enjoying the broad base of support he had hoped for. Leaders of said nationalist movements have politely shunned him. “I would say that there isn’t much follow-up on Bannon,” said an official from the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy, a Euroskeptic group in the European Parliament.

Part of the Movement’s stagnation stems from various legal hang-ups. As Bannon explained to Politico, “We aren’t doing polling or war room”—two initiatives the Movement had initially set its sights on—“because lawyers have told us that it’s illegal in different countries, and we know we are being closely looked at, so we don’t want to do anything which is against the law.” But another, more vexatious problem appears to be Bannon himself. Marine Le Pen, the founder of France’s National Front, initially expressed skepticism that Bannon could have any impact in Europe, considering he does not “come from a European country.” A senior official from the League, an Italian populist party, told Politico that “Bannon is not on the radar,” and that it “looks like he’s going after money.” “Bannon has collided with the mille-feuille that is Europe,” said the E.F.D.D. official, “[and] the only thing he can do at this stage is to encourage Euroskeptic parties in the election race.”

Even Modrikamen has scaled back his expectations for the group, admitting to Politico that “Bannon has been a little too optimistic on what we were able to achieve.” Bannon, he added, should position himself as a “facilitator,” rather than a firebrand leader, with the aim of establishing “a Davos of populists.”

Bannon’s enthusiasm, however, will not be dampened. “What we are doing is workshops, conferences, talking to like-minded people,” he told Politico, adding that he plans to travel through Europe in the run-up to the E.U.’s parliamentary election, and that he’s “waiting for late March or early May to do a big conference in Brussels.” (“The room is available, and the contracts are ready,” said Modrikamen.) Perhaps Bannon believes he can repeat his 2016 coup in Europe, dominating the rising populist wave through sheer force of personality. Or perhaps his Brussels conference will recall his documentary screenings this past fall, which drew a crowd so meager as to be embarrassing.

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