Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist under the Trump administration, celebrated the European elections this week, saying that Europe is “on fire with the right.”
On Monday, Bannon opened his show War Room on Real Americas Voice, by speaking about the elections in the European Union‘s (EU) 27 member states, which has seen far-right parties make gains in several countries.
Bannon said we saw a “tectonic plate shift in Europe” and noted that right-wing and “sovereignty” parties made advancements in the elections over the past few days.
“Most importantly, at the national level, blew out the government of France,” Bannon said while speaking about right-wing parties. “There’s gonna be a big election coming up in a couple of weeks. Europe’s on fire with the right.”
Newsweek reached out to Bannon’s attorney via email for comment.
Monday marked three days of voting in the EU parliamentary elections, where many conservative parties took leads over the opposition in several countries, including France.
“In France, the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen, won 31.5 percent of the vote, more than twice the 14.5 percent of the Besoin d’Europe alliance, which includes President Emmanuel Macron‘s Renaissance, prompting the French head of state to call a snap parliamentary election in four weeks.
Similarly, in Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s arch-conservative Brothers of Italy group won 28.8 percent of the vote, quadrupling what it took in the 2019 EU ballot and exceeding the 26 percent it secured in the 2022 national election.
Germany also saw conservative parties leading in the elections, as the country’s Alternative for Germany (AFD) extreme right party, won 16.2 percent of the vote, overtaking the Social Democrats led by current Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The Associated Press reported that the 16.2 percent won by the AFD is an increase from the 11 percent they received in 2019, but lower than ratings from earlier this year.
According to The Associated Press, Kevin Kühnert, the general secretary of the Social Democrats in Germany, said, “This is a hard defeat for us today…we will come back, we will fight our way out of this.”
While speaking with Newsweek earlier on Monday, Pawel Zerca, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said, “On top of national political consequences, the key outcome of the election is a rightward shift in the European Parliament.”
“The biggest winners of this election are the two families of the radical right,” Zerca told Newsweek on Friday.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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