Here are a couple of relatively safe bets you can make right now about the European parliamentary elections that commenced yesterday and will continue through the weekend.

One is that nationalist, populist, far-right parties will surge, winning up to a third of the seats in the contest. The other is that Steve Bannon—Donald Trump’s erstwhile campaign manager, former White House chief strategist, and self-styled populist-whisperer to the world—will be there, trying to grab some credit for their success.

Bannon, as you may recall, began haunting Europe in the spring of 2018. Reprising his role as a blustering, reactionary Gandalf in baggy cargo pants, he turned up in piazzas and hotel suites across the continent, promising to unite Europe’s notoriously fractious populist right.

Beneath his grand vision, of course, was a sales pitch. Having recently lost his chief American clients and benefactors, Bannon was now offering Europe’s far-right parties his services as a political consultant. In advance of the 2019 EU parliamentary elections, he would give them messaging that could “dominate news cycles,” as well as data analysis and polling. He also offered membership in an umbrella group with a vaguely revolutionary, messianic name—the Movement—that would yoke their various parties together under a unified Bannonite theory of global anti-globalism.

But aside from dominating a few news cycles itself, Bannon’s big plan never actually got off the ground. “There is no Movement,” says a source close to Bannon and the effort. In November 2018, an investigation by The Guardian revealed that the Movement would violate the electoral laws in most of the countries Bannon planned to operate in, which either barred or restricted in-kind election contributions from foreign entities.

As comical as that mistake was, other impediments ran perhaps even deeper. While some European leaders—like Matteo Salvini in Italy and Viktor Orban in Hungary—were initially enthusiastic about working with Bannon, other nationalists turned up their noses at the overtures of a foreign interloper (He “doesn’t come from a European country,” said Marine Le Pen) and found his ideas clumsy and offensive. Which partly goes to show that Europe’s nationalists are out of step with each other.

But in at least one respect, Bannon was out of step with nearly all of them.

Last August, shortly after he announced his plan for the Movement, Bannon told CNN that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google were run by “sociopaths” and “narcissists,” adding: “These people ought to be controlled, they ought to be regulated." Big Tech companies, he said, "have to be broken up, just like Teddy Roosevelt broke up the trusts.” Part of Bannon’s grand unified theory is that Silicon Valley is a cultural enemy that needs to be brought to heel.