Jordan Bardella drops out of conservative US event after speaker gives Hitler salute

The president of France's leading far-right party has cancelled his appearance at a right-wing conference in Washington after one of its best-known speakers gave the crowd a Nazi salute.

National Rally (RN) leader Jordan Bardella was due to speak at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday.

However, he announced he was withdrawing after the former Trump adviser, far-right ideologue and pardoned felon Steve Bannon ended his speech at the event with the words "fight, fight, fight" and extended his right arm upward in what appeared to be a Hitler salute.

Bardella had been due to address the conference on links between the US and France and the momentum gathering behind "patriotic parties" in Europe. But in a statement issued on Friday, he explicitly identified the reason for his decision to pull out of the event.

"At the podium yesterday, when I was not present in the room, one of the speakers provocatively made a gesture referring to Nazi ideology," he explained, saying that he pulled out "immediately" after Bannon's actions were brought to his attention.

Bardella and Marine Le Pen, who leads the RN group in the French parliament, have previously celebrated US President Donald Trump's return to power.

Earlier this month, Le Pen spoke at "Make Europe Great Again", a conference organised by the Spanish far-right party Vox, where she said that a wave of Trump-style politics was sweeping through Europe.

"The election of Donald Trump cannot be analysed solely as a simple changeover in a democratic country," Le Pen said. "Nor even just as the patriotic awakening of a nation that would rightly dismiss the forces of decline. We are facing a truly global tipping point."

She also claimed that the parties assembled at the conference were the only ones in Europe who could communicate properly with the Trump administration.

Le Pen made her remarks more than two weeks after top Trump ally Elon Musk gave a similar salute at a Trump inaugural event. Musk has also endorsed the German far-right AfD party, with whom RN refused to sit in the European Parliament.

CPAC is a fixture of the Washington political calendar dating back to the 1970s. Formerly a clearinghouse for the broad US conservative movement and a key platform for rising stars in the Republican Party, it is now closely associated with Trump's MAGA movement and routinely features some of the more inflammatory figures associated with it.