Bannon salute at right-wing event sparks outcry, even on French right

OXON HILL, Md. — A raised-arm salute by Steve Bannon that to many resembled a Nazi gesture incited an outcry Friday not just from liberal critics of President Donald Trump and his allies but also from a leader of the European right.

It came a month after Elon Musk made a similar salute, and at a combustible moment when the administration of Trump, who has long been dogged by charges of encouraging far-right extremism, appears to be leaning more aggressively into far-right alliances around the world.

Bannon, a former chief White House strategist and a longtime thought leader in Trump’s populist movement, denied that the gesture he made Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington was a Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute. In a text message, he explained that he had “waved to the MAGA movement as I always do in my motivational speeches.”

But Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s far-right National Rally, announced Friday morning that he had canceled his plans to speak at the conference after “one of the speakers provocatively made a gesture referring to Nazi ideology.”

The gesture echoed one that Musk, the billionaire leading Trump’s cost-cutting efforts, made on Inauguration Day.

Trump and his allies have long drawn outrage for refusing to denounce white nationalists. In 2017, Trump was criticized by even prominent Republicans for referring to “very fine people on both sides” of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a demonstrator killed a counterprotester.

But Bannon’s and Musk’s gestures have occurred as Trump is also extending a hand to previously marginalized political movements with links to white nationalism abroad.

Through Vice President JD Vance, the White House has openly built bridges this month to Alternative for Germany, or AfD, a German right-wing party that has been marginalized for years in that country for some of its members having reveled in Nazi slogans, but which polls suggest may become the second-largest party in Germany’s parliament in elections Sunday.

Bannon, who left Trump’s first administration after seven months but remains an influential figure on the right through his “War Room” podcast and movement-building efforts, made the gesture near the end of his speech at CPAC.

Suggesting again that Trump pursue a constitutionally prohibited third term, Bannon rallied a crowded ballroom with the phrase “Fight, fight, fight,” quoting Trump’s words after surviving an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last year. Then, as the crowd cheered and applauded, Bannon extended his right arm to his side, his palm facing down, in a quick salute.

In his text message Friday, Bannon assailed Bardella for pulling out of CPAC, attacking him in vulgar terms and calling him a “pretty boy” who was “too weak to govern France.”

“Bardella’s a nothing,” he said later in an interview Friday. “MAGA has no use for this guy.”

Bannon’s gesture followed a similar salute at Trump’s inauguration rally by Musk, who has pushed to eliminate agencies that fund aid and development programs abroad, including many that have rankled Europe’s right-wing political parties.

Musk has vocally supported AfD for months, writing on the social platform X that “only the AfD can save Germany.” He has also for years warned of the threat of a “genocide of white people” in his home country of South Africa based on statements by far-left politicians there. Trump nodded to such claims in an executive order he signed this month, halting all U.S. aid to South Africa and prioritizing the resettlement of white “Afrikaner refugees” to the United States.

The gestures come at a time when Trump and his allies are working to build relationships across an ascendant class of right-wing political movements around the world, a number of which were represented at CPAC.

But Bardella’s decision highlighted some tensions within that project, particularly in Europe, where even far-right parties have flinched at associations with Nazism. Salutes like those made by Bannon and Musk are illegal in Germany, where intelligence agencies have classified — and surveilled — elements of AfD as extremists.

While the Alternative for Germany has reveled in Musk and Vance’s support, Bardella’s National Rally has found that associations with Trump’s allies could also be a liability. The party, founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, spent years trying to remake its image and distance itself from its reputation for racism and antisemitism, a normalization strategy that has paid off in broadened appeal to French voters.

Bannon’s gesture also quickly became a headache for Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, who is scheduled to give a video address at CPAC on Saturday. Like Bardella and his party, Meloni, whose career Bannon had supported, has in recent years moderated many stances of her Brothers of Italy party, which has roots in Italy’s fascist past.

Her opponents have seized on Bannon’s salute. Elly Schlein, the leader of Italy’s Democratic Party, said Meloni “should have the decency to disassociate herself from this neo-fascist gathering to serve, for once, the interests of Italy.”

A spokesperson for Meloni said she was not aware of any plans to cancel her video appearance. And Antonio Giordano, the secretary-general of Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament, disputed that Bannon’s gesture was a Nazi salute.

At least one other CPAC speaker appeared to defiantly echo Bannon’s gesture Friday. Eduardo Verástegui, a Mexican actor and conservative activist, raised his hand from his heart in a similar salute, holding it raised as some in the crowd applauded. He then pumped his fist and repeated the word “fight.”