Marine Le Pen may be the dominant figure of the French far right, but in Trump world, a little-known European Parliament lawmaker called Sarah Knafo is making inroads. Knafo, a crypto-aficionado and supporter of tech billionaire Elon Musk, is one of the leading figures of France’s Reconquest, a fringe nationalist party with strong anti-Islam views led by former presidential candidate Eric Zemmour.
Knafo, 31, and Zemmour, 66, were among the few French politicians to bag an invite to U.S. President Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration, snagging seats at the Capital One Arena before attending the Liberty Ball later in the evening.
National Rally (RN) party chief Le Pen, whom the president famously stood up during a 2017 visit to Trump Tower, sent a three-person RN delegation, but did not personally attend. Le Pen has spent years trying to purge her party of racist and anti-Semitic elements. Her “de-demonization” strategy has made her the frontrunner to be France’s next president in the 2027 election, and she has been cautious about risking those hard-won gains by sidling up to Trump, who is widely disliked by voters in Western Europe.
Knafo, who is emerging from Zemmour’s shadow to be the driving force of Reconquest, has no such qualms.
She has spent the last few years grafting herself to the intellectual architecture of Trump 2.0 – a retooled political brand that fuses U.S. nationalism, tech evangelism and anti-establishment fervour – to pitch herself as the movement’s natural representative in France.
“Reconquest is the only party in France that defends this mix: pro-tech, pro-business, but also the defence of national identity,” Knafo told Reuters in an interview. Reconquest is a minnow compared to the slightly less extreme RN, France’s largest parliamentary party. Zemmour, a Jew of North African descent who won just 7% of votes in the 2022 presidential vote, has proposed banning the first name Mohammed and carrying out mass deportations to preserve French identity.
Knafo, who is also of North African Jewish descent, has sought to modernize Reconquest by aligning herself with the new political currents flowing from across the Atlantic.
She acknowledged Trump’s techno-conservatism is a hard-sell in France, where the welfare state is prized over libertarian disruption, but was betting Trump wouldn’t back Le Pen.
“The de-demonization aspect is the opposite of what Trump advocates,” Knafo said. “He doesn’t have much respect for it.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Le Pen’s wariness of Trump appears to be ebbing. She recently said his pressure on Colombia to receive deported migrants should be copied by France. Last weekend, she said the RN was “the best placed in France to speak with the Donald Trump administration,” adding that her powerful wingman Jordan Bardella would soon travel to the United States.
RN spokesman Laurent Jacobelli did not respond to a request for comment.
Luc Rouban, a Sciences Po political scientist, said the RN is finely attuned to voter concerns in France, and doubted Knafo’s Trumpian conceit could succeed electorally.
“The United States is not France,” he said.
