National Harbor, Maryland-the French leader of the extreme right, Jordan Bardella, canceled on Friday his comments planned here at the Conservative Political Action Conference after Steve Bannon, former president of President Donald Trump, who is now a popular host of Conservative podcast, made a hand gesture that some said it seemed to be a Nazi greeting.
“Yesterday, while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers for provocation allowed a gesture by referring to Nazi ideology. Therefore, I made the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon,” said Bardella in A statement to the French media.
The controversy occurs a month after Elon Musk was accused of giving Nazi greeting in one of Trump’s opening events, wrapping conservatives even more in a debate about whether their leaders are paying tribute intentionally to a brutal responsible regime of the systemic murder of millions of Jews in the 1940s.
It is also the most recent incident in CPAC where an assistant seemed to refer to Nazi ideology.
Bannon’s incident arrived on Thursday when he spoke with the multitude of conservative activists.
“The only way they win is if we retire,” Bannon said at the end of his speech. “And we are not going to retire. We are not going to give up. We are not going to quit smoking. Fight, fight, fight!”
Then he extended his right arm.
In an interview with NBC News on Thursday at the conference, Bannon denied that the gesture was greeting.
“I do it all the time. I go out to my crowd, because it’s about them,” said Bannon, saying that the controversy was a distraction of the substance of his speech.
“All he has done is make the speech even bigger,” he added. “But the boy from France, you need to be hard to combat. He is just a P — and”.
“Maga will never support him … he is a pretty child,” Bannon added, referring to Bardella. “You can never lead France if the main media are afraid.”
The National Rally did not respond to a request for comments for this story.
At the conference, the gesture attracted a silent response from the attendees. The crowd did not record an additional reaction to the gesture. Many attendees in the row for an encounter with Bannon Friday had not seen Bannon’s speech, or had seen him and thought that calling him greeting was an incorrect framing or a leftist trolling.
Greg Conte, a nationalist nationalist who attended the 2017 mortal joins the correct demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, later said in the lobby of the conference that speakers like Musk and Bannon who have used the gesture are the signage of virtue, calling the conference ” conservative of Zio “and criticize his support for Israel.
“Any ‘Nazi greeting’ of Bannon, musk or any other capitalist oligarch is a stupid position,” Conte said.
Musk, a technological billionaire who has become a force with Trump’s conservatives, even when he has sometimes been discussed with Bannon, he later joked about his own controversy and made fun of those who said he had referred to Nazism.
“Frankly, they need better dirty tricks,” Musk published in X at that time. “The attack ‘Everyone is Hitler’ is so tired.”
Bardella has been president of the National Right Rally (RN) since 2022. Both have expressed their support for Trump in the past, but also pointed out that support has limitations.
“I like Donald Trump’s patriotism does not mean being the vassal of the United States,” Bardella said in early 2024, according to France 24.
Bardella, 28, is the president of the extreme right party of Marine Le Pen and has been a member of the European Parliament since 2019. He has a strong follow -up with young voters and a great presence on social networks. He and his party have pressed more restrictive immigration policies.
On Saturday, Trump is ready to go to CPAC, an event in which his presence is coming a little more than a month after he formally assumed the position.
Trump’s victory in each of the main swing states during the 2024 race against former vice president Kamala Harris gave his team what they saw as a mandate, which they have used to move aggressively. An outstanding piece of that agenda has included the installation of Musk and the so -called government efficiency department, which have worked quickly to reduce the size and scope of the government.
Musk was received as a rock star on the CPAC stage on Thursday, walking with a chainsaw that the Argentine president of the right Javier Milei gave him. The gift was destined to symbolize that Musk is destroying government waste.
“I have become meme,” Musk told the CPAC crowd. Then he told them that Dege is “fighting against the matrix.”
