Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage says he will be returning to the United States to campaign for his good friend President Trump in the 2020 election, just as soon as he has got his own general election out of the way.
He is hoping to win his party’s first parliamentary seats when voters go to the polls on Thursday.
But he says he continues to see parallels between Britain and America.
“I see Trump as part of the same project as Brexit, really, so I very much hope he gets reelected, and I guess you might be seeing a bit more of me,” he told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview. “I’ve not been in the U.S. for a bit. I’ve been rather tied up. But I’m acutely aware of what’s going on in November 2020. I think it’s going to be a very, very big battle.”
Farage was one of the key players in Britain’s Brexit referendum in 2016. The shock result in June led to him speaking at a Trump campaign event in Mississippi that year and heralded the start of a populist wave that carried Trump to power.
Once again, he said he saw working-class voters who were not being taken seriously by the political elite, who in Britain were intent on overturning the referendum result.
“The message that the Islington-run Labour Party thinks you are all a bunch of morons in the north of England and you didn’t understand what you were voting for, and you must go and vote again, has gone down extremely badly,” he said, referencing a chic London borough that is home to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
His party exploded on to the scene in May. Almost a third of voters, weary of years of Brexit wrangling, backed Farage in European elections.
It made him a potential kingmaker in a general election.
But support has slipped as Theresa May resigned as prime minister to be replaced by Boris Johnson, who has taken a tougher line on leaving the European Union, expelling members of Parliament from the Conservative Party if they failed to back him.
Farage must also contend with Britain’s first-past-the-post system, which makes it difficult for small parties to win representation.
He is hoping that his anti-elitist message will win support among blue-collar voters in the north of England. Many areas backed Brexit but are represented by Labour MPs who want to remain in the E.U. or who are campaigning for a second referendum.
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