Steve Bannon yelled “fight, fight, fight” before extending his right arm, fingers pointed and palm down, during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) near Washington DC on Thursday evening.

Bardella, who leads France’s National Rally party, was scheduled to speak at the event on Friday. He said in a statement that he was cancelling his appearance over what he called a “gesture referring to Nazi ideology”.

Bannon denied the Nazi comparison and called the gesture a “wave”, saying it was the “exact same wave” he did on stage at a speech seven years ago in France to Bardella’s party.

“If he cancelled [the speech] 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 told the French news magazine Le Point.

Inside the halls of the suburban convention centre hosting Cpac, Romanian far-right leader George Simion also disagreed with Bardella’s interpretation of Bannon’s hand gesture.

“Any historian knows that wasn’t a Nazi salute,” he told the BBC.

Bannon’s on-stage gesture appeared to mirror one from tech billionaire-turned-presidential adviser Elon Musk during Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. Musk also denied he had performed a Nazi salute after an uproar.

Bardella, seen as a future French presidential hopeful, was one of several high-profile international politicians scheduled to speak at Cpac during the four-day conference, which began on Wednesday.

Former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss addressed the conservative bash on its first day, telling attendees that the British state was “failing”. On Thursday, Argentine President Javier Milei handed Elon Musk a shiny chainsaw that he wielded on stage, celebrating sweeping cuts to the federal government by his Doge initiative.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is due to speak on Saturday, ahead of President Trump’s address.

The annual Cpac conference has become increasingly dominated by Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, and this year, it has taken on a celebratory tone in the wake of his election victory in November.

Speaker after speaker have lauded the blizzard of action launched by the White House in the month since the Republican returned to the Oval Office.

Bannon was met with a standing ovation after his speech on Thursday, which ended with the controversial gesture.

“The only way that they win is if we retreat, and we are not going to retreat,” he told the crowd.

“We’re not going to surrender, we are not going to quit, we’re going to fight, fight, fight.”

Bannon was Trump’s top adviser at the start of his first term in office before the president fired him. The firebrand conservative hosts the influential War Room podcast, listened to by legions of Trump supporters.

He was released from prison in October, after serving four months for defying a congressional subpoena over the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

In another case, Bannon was spared prison time after pleading guilty earlier this month to defrauding donors over a fundraiser to build a US-Mexico border wall.

In an interview with an Italian newspaper, Bannon said he had made it his personal mission to ensure Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, does not have access to Trump’s incoming administration and is treated “like any other person”.

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it – I’m not prepared to tolerate it any more,” Bannon told the Corriere della Sera newspaper, excerpts of which were republished over the weekend by Bannon’s former media outlet Breitbart News.

Bannon also said that Musk, a South African-born naturalised US citizen, should “go back” to his place of birth after the billionaire publicly defended the use of the H-1B visa programme to recruit highly-skilled foreign tech workers.

“Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

Bannon’s broadside comes amid a public rift among Trump’s followers over the role of foreign employees in Silicon Valley.

The divisions burst into view last month after Trump’s decision to name Indian American venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence unleashed a wave of invective from far-right and nationalist MAGA followers, who interpreted the appointment as an endorsement of H-1B visas.

Musk, who held an H-1B visa before obtaining US citizenship, hit out at the criticism of foreign workers in Silicon Valley, promising to “go to war on this issue” to a degree “you cannot possibly comprehend”.

Despite taking steps to restrict H-1B visa issuances during his first term, Trump sided with Musk’s comments, calling the visas a “great programme.”

In his newspaper interview, Bannon, who served as White House chief strategist during Trump’s first term, accused Musk of having the “maturity of a little boy” and attempting to establish “techno-feudalism on a global scale”.

“We’ve seen peak Elon, his intrusive nature, his lack of understanding of the true issues, and, quite frankly, his support of just himself, the sole objective is to become a trillionaire. That’s his objective,” he said.

“He will do anything related to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money. His aggregation of wealth, and then – through wealth – power: that’s what he’s focused on. The American working people in this country are not going to tolerate it.”

Musk, who is a prolific commentator on news events on his social media platform X, has not publicly responded to Bannon’s remarks.

Ranked as the world’s richest person with a net worth of more than $400bn, Musk has become one of Trump’s most powerful and influential allies since he publicly endorsed the Republican following his attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13.

Trump has included the tech billionaire in meetings with lawmakers and foreign leaders, and tapped him to co-lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency alongside bio-tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.