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Steve Bannon’s gesture at a Washington conference led Jordan Bardella to cancel his speech.
Bannon, a former adviser to Donald Trump, insisted the gesture was a “wave” not a Nazi salute.
Bardella’s withdrawal highlights tensions over Bannon’s controversial actions and the National Rally’s efforts to reshape its image.
Accusations of an apparent Nazi salute by American conservative firebrand and Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon at a Washington convention led a French far-right leader to withdraw from the event on Friday.
Bannon, a former adviser to US President Donald Trump, briefly held out a stiffened arm with his palm down at the conference on Thursday night local time as he called on the audience to “fight, fight, fight”.
He reacted with fury to Bardella’s withdrawal, calling the French politician “a little boy, not a man” and “unworthy of leading France” in a video interview with French weekly Le Point.
Musk dismissed criticism at the time, saying on his X platform: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
Steve Bannon does a NAZI salute at the end of his CPAC speech. Someone try and convince me that he didn’t. pic.twitter.com/A2yo4djJzU
“I had been invited... to make a speech on the links between the United States and France, as well as the recent electoral dynamic of patriot parties in Europe,” Bardella said in a statement.
“Yesterday, while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers out of provocation allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology. I therefore took the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon,” he said.
An adviser to Bardella confirmed to AFP that he was speaking about Bannon.
Bardella, 29, took over from Marine Le Pen as Rassemblement National (RN) leader in 2022, but the two remain close allies.
The RN has in the past been accused of anti-Semitism and Le Pen has worked to make the party more acceptable.
It won a record number of parliamentary seats in an election last year and Le Pen is expected to be a strong contender in a 2027 presidential election.
French far-right Rassemblement National (RN) president and member of the European Parliament Jordan Bardella. Photo / AFP
He spent nearly four months in federal prison last year for contempt of a Congress inquiry into the 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
‘Unworthy to lead’
“He’s unworthy,” Bannon said of Bardella.
“If he cancelled it over what the mainstream media said about the speech, he didn’t listen to the speech. If that’s true he’s unworthy to lead France. He’s a boy not a man,” Bannon said in the interview released by Le Point.
Steve Bannon speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel And Convention Centre on February 20 in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Photo / AFP
Bannon said he did “that exact same wave” at a conference of Le Pen’s party in France seven years ago.
“If he’s that worried about it and wets himself like a little child then he’s unworthy and will never lead France.”
The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish activist group, did not mention Bannon’s gesture but said in a post that Bannon has a “long and disturbing history of stoking antisemitism and hate, threatening violence, and empowering extremists”.
It added: “We are not surprised, but are concerned about the normalisation of this behaviour.”
