The National Front was contesting local elections across France on Sunday. But Ludovic de Danne, an adviser on European affairs to the party’s leader, Marine Le Pen, said he had known nothing about the St. Petersburg meeting.

Of course, Ms. Le Pen has no need to sit in a cramped conference room at the St. Petersburg Holiday Inn with 300 other delegates. On Friday, in an interview on state-run Rossiya 24, a national cable news channel, she said both Europe and Russia were hurt by sanctions and thus needed to work together to dismantle them. Last year, the National Front secured a multimillion-dollar loan from a Russian bank. But beyond plane tickets and hotel rooms, it is unclear that marginal organizations can expect much, particularly given Russia’s financial problems.

In her absence, Ms. Le Pen was criticized by various participants. One French speaker said she had gay friends, while Roberto Fiore, a longtime war horse of right-wing politics in Italy, sniffed that the French party had started to take a “slightly more politically correct line.”

Mr. Fiore praised Russia as the vanguard of Europe’s future, a common theme among both Russian and foreign speakers. “We are the avant-garde of a new Europe that will very soon emerge,” he said. “It will be a Christian Europe, a patriotic Europe, and Russia will not just be a part but a leading force.”

Others were even more effusive. Jim Dowson, a British nationalist, flashed a picture on an overhead screen of Mr. Putin shirtless riding a bear. “Obama and America, they are like females. They are feminized men,” he said. “But you have been blessed by a man who is a man, and we envy that.”

Conference participants repeatedly endorsed the efforts of the separatists in Ukraine, where, Russia says, a “fascist” coup overthrew the legitimately elected government in February 2014.

The United States, as the main adversary, attracted the most hostility, but a couple of American speakers received warm applause by painting Washington as an aggressor trying to export its misguided new values.