美国国家公共电台 NPR European Elections Will Be A Test For Nationalist Parties Hoping To Remake The EU（在线收听）

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Some 400 million people in 28 countries are eligible to vote in this week's elections for the European Union Parliament, the only popularly elected EU institution. Most countries vote tomorrow. As NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports, the Europe-wide result will be a critical test of strength for nationalist parties that want to remake the EU.

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SYLVIA POGGIOLI, BYLINE: This month in Florence, trumpets welcomed politicians and academics to discuss the state of Europe's union. The musicians' Renaissance costumes evoked Europe's past. Center-left politician Frans Timmermans of the Netherlands stressed the urgency of the current moment and what's at stake in these elections.

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FRANS TIMMERMANS: If we screw this up, none of us in this room can look our children in the eye anymore. If we screw this up, we screw it up for generations.

POGGIOLI: Timmermans is one of the mainstream candidates who's hoping the incoming European Parliament will make him president of the EU executive body, the European Commission. He's already a vice president part of the EU establishment in Brussels. And he's worried.

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TIMMERMANS: I believe this is the first time since the beginning of European integration that this European Union could actually break apart. This is no longer a nightmare or a bad dream. It is a potential reality.

POGGIOLI: Timmermans' nightmare scenario is not the prospect of the other member states following Britain and voting to leave the EU. Negotiating Brexit has been so chaotic, leaving doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore. Instead, the anti-immigrant nationalist parties who think Brussels wields too much power are running for seats in the European Parliament. From there, they would try to water down the EU's federal powers over individual nation states. Or as they would put it, they will try to reclaim sovereignty for their peoples.

CAIO GIULIO CESARE MUSSOLINI: If these populist and sovereignist movements are rising, it means that there is something wrong in this Europe. And we will try to do our best to change this European Union from inside.

POGGIOLI: That's Italy's Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini. He's the great-grandson of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and unapologetic about the legacy of fascism. He's running for a seat in the EU Parliament from the small hard-right Brothers of Italy Party. The campaign to remake the EU has a big booster from across the Atlantic - Donald Trump's former strategic adviser, Steve Bannon, who has been spending a lot of time in Europe advising various parties. Bannon says a populist victory across Europe would put an end to closer economic and political integration and restore the continent closer to where it was before the EU was founded in the 1950s.

STEVE BANNON: And that is a Europe of Nations - discussions on immigration and some of these basic hot-button issues. The 30,000 pages of regulation that the EU has, I think's going to start being cut in half, I think you'll start to see deregulation, and I think that over time you're going to see more changes of power coming back to the individual nation states.

POGGIOLI: Bannon is advising Matteo Salvini, Italy's populist interior minister. He's also advising Marine Le Pen, leader of France's populist National Rally movement and Hungary's autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban. They've all made curbing immigration into Europe, especially from the Muslim world, a central platform plank. To promote such policies, Bannon is setting up an academy for Judeo-Christian Values at an old monastery outside Rome. When he was in Italy recently, he was confident.

BANNON: The momentum is on the side of the sovereignty movement. The momentum is on the side of the nationalist movement. The momentum is on the side of the populist movement.

POGGIOLI: Polls do project that after this week's elections, populists will more than double their seats in the EU Parliament from five to more than 14% - not enough to veto legislation but sufficient to weaken legislative control of the pro-EU center-right and center-left parties. Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Florence.