Meet the little-known far-right French politician with a direct line to Trump world

By Elizabeth Pineau

PARIS (Reuters) - 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.

TRUMP TIES

Knafo studied at France's ENA administrative college, an elite finishing school whose alumni include President Emmanuel Macron, before joining Zemmour for his failed presidential bid.

During the 2022 campaign, Zemmour's anti-Islamism attracted the interest of Trump, who was at a low ebb after losing the 2020 election.

"'Don't give up,'" Knafo recalled Trump telling Zemmour in a widely reported 2022 call. "'Now you're visible, all the media will be against you. They'll say you're too brutal, too radical. Don't listen to them. Don't talk to the media. Talk directly to the people.'"

Knafo said she subsequently gravitated to Trump-aligned conservative thinkers, figures like journalist Christopher Caldwell and Michael Anton, who recently became a senior U.S. State Department official. 

Caldwell visited her at the European Parliament last month while Knafo met with Anton at Trump's inauguration, according to posts on her Instagram account.

Anton and Caldwell, who both declined to comment, are senior fellows at the Claremont Institute, a California think-tank and intellectual cradle for Trumpism with close links to Vice President JD Vance.

Last year, Knafo spent around two weeks in California as a Claremont fellow with young conservative stars, including Natalie Winters, the co-host of Steve Bannon's popular War Room podcast. Winters didn't respond to requests for comment.

MUSK'S ORBIT

After the fellowship, Knafo returned to Brussels where she delivered a September speech that was picked up by popular accounts on Musk's X. 

"We will always prefer ... Elon Musk to Ursula von der Leyen, freedom to censorship," she declared, in reference to the European Commission president.

Knafo said her speech caught the eye of Jacob Helberg, a Paris-born tech executive who Trump has nominated to be the State Department's top economist. He invited her to attend a Miami memorial for Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel, where she said she shared a few words with Trump. That led to an invite to the United States for the November 4 election, and then another for Trump's inauguration.

Helberg's spokeswoman, Marcy Simon, confirmed Helberg had invited Knafo to the U.S. events.

While in the United States for the inauguration, Knafo also met with crypto billionaire Michael Saylor, the co-founder of bitcoin stockpiler Strategy, to discuss "the upcoming French elections," according to her social media posts. 

Saylor did not respond to Reuters requests for comment, but reposted Knafo's account of their meeting on X, writing "France could use more Bitcoin." 

Knafo said the links she is building with Trump-world could outlast his four years in office, as then "JD Vance can be president." 

(Writing by and additional reporting by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)