France is in love with revolution, and Jordan Bardella, a suave, well-dressed 28-year-old rebel, has vowed to upend French politics to save the country from “disappearing.”
Bardella, the National Rally leader, is a protégé of Marine Le Pen, 55, the longtime far-right presidential candidate. She once called him “little lion” and now calls him “lion.” A delicate-looking, strong-jawed TikTok star known for his love of candy, he has certainly played a hand in the jungle of French politics.
With Sunday’s European Parliament elections approaching, Bardella, who leads the National Rally campaign, appears poised for a victory that could reshape French politics. An Ipsos poll published last week showed the National Rally with about 33% of the vote, more than double the 16% for President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ennahda party.
Even if the EU’s only directly elected body has limited actual powers, it would be a stark repudiation of France’s leaders, who, as elsewhere in Europe, are experiencing a rapid process of normalisation of the far right.
Just as a divided France, tired of business as usual and anxious about the future, has suddenly found a more acceptable politics of exclusion, the National Rally has long been seen as a direct threat to French democracy. It helps that Bardella is young, has reassuring showmanship and doesn’t have the Le Pen surname.
Indeed, his success has made a leadership battle imminent. For now, Ms Le Pen and her prodigal son are an embracing and seemingly harmonious duo (Mr Bardella dates Ms Le Pen's niece, Norwegian Olivier). But Mr Bardella's popularity is such that the prodigy risks surpassing his creator.
Ms. Le Pen still has ambitions to become president when Macron’s term ends in 2027. She has said she would make Mr. Bardella prime minister if she were elected.
“The moderate conservative right in France has died and the National Rally could come to power for the first time,” said Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist who studies nationalist movements in Europe.
The son of an Italian immigrant whose mother grew up in the slums north of Paris, Bardella broke with the dominance of cookie-cutter technocrats trained in elite schools in France. He recast, and some say whitewashed, the angry message of the nationalist right, earning rumours of “Bardella mania”.
“Our civilization could perish,” Badella told more than 5,000 flag-waving supporters last week as chants of “Jordan! Jordan!” echoed through a large stadium in Paris. “Our civilization could perish because it would be overwhelmed by immigrants who would irreversibly change our customs, our culture, our way of life.”
Alexandre Loubet, Bardella's campaign director, said the party “will demand the dissolution of the National Assembly” and new elections if the National Rally wins a clear victory. “If Mr Macron had the least respect for the will of the French people, he would do so,” Loubet said.
Macron has a limited term of three years left and is unlikely to do anything like this, regardless of the outcome.
Bardella always tells the story in a calm tone, saying that Macron has led France into the abyss through rampant immigration, lax handling of lawlessness and violence, the loss of French characteristics, and “punitive” ecological changes that make life unbearable.
“Everything is getting worse and worse,” said Alain Foy, a protocol officer who attended Bardella’s rally in Paris. “Sometimes I can’t believe what is happening, whether it’s immigration, purchasing power, insecurity, everything.” His sister, Marie Foy, added, “France is falling apart.”
Mr. Foy said that in the past, anyone who disagreed with the National Rally would be quick to label Ms. Le Pen a racist or a fascist. “But with Bardella,” he said, “the good thing is that he has the same ideas, but they can’t call him a racist because he is the child of immigrants from Italian parents.”
Bardella's upbringing in the suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis is unclear. He described his childhood as a neighborhood rife with drug dealing and violence, where life was tough and refusing a cigarette could get you killed. His mother separated from his father when he was a year old and lived a hard life, barely making ends meet.
However, Pascal Humeau, who was close to Bardella for many years, said Bardella attended a private school, the Lycée Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle, with tuition paid for by his father, who ran a small business renting out coffee and vending machines.
Badla proved to be a good student with strong political convictions. In 2012, at the age of 16, he joined the party he now leads, then known as the National Front. He interned for a week at the local police station, an experience that appears to have influenced his political leanings.
“It was clear that he wasn’t from a working-class background, but he wasn’t privileged either,” Mr. Camus said. Although he graduated from high school with honors, Mr. Bardella dropped out of college to pursue a career in politics, which was essentially the only job he ever held.
With his calm demeanor, good looks and extraordinary charisma, he was quickly seen in Le Pen's entourage as the ideal representative for a reshaped National Rally, away from the anti-Semitic rhetoric of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, who once called the Holocaust a “detail” of history.
Le Pen, determined to bring her party into the mainstream, pushed him hard. Hume, a former journalist who became Bardella’s media trainer in 2018, found in Hume a “rather sad young man, repeating Le Pen’s routine, a shell of himself, very restrained but with very little knowledge of what was happening in France or the world.”
Bardella, however, was a quick study. He learned to smile, act more relaxed, maintain an air of “voluntary humility,” and eventually became what Humer calls “a modern media beast that scares opponents.”
I asked him what he wanted to do. “He had one goal since he was 17 — to become prime minister and president,” Mr. Humo said. “I don’t think anyone can stop him.”
If Mr. Badella has taken pains to present the moderate face of the National Alliance, there is little evidence that his own views or those of the party have become moderate.
Large-scale immigration – some 5.1 million migrants expected to enter EU in 2022Polls show poverty among French households, a central issue in the European Parliament elections, has more than doubled from the previous year, as the war in Ukraine has led to higher energy and food prices, making it harder for French families to make ends meet.
Against this backdrop, the National Rally has managed to present itself as the home of French patriotism, a party with legitimate concerns about runaway immigration.
With his Italian background, Mr. Bardella was able to argue that the problem was not immigration itself but the refusal of many immigrants to integrate. In France, the left tends to view the term patriotism with suspicion, seeing it as the first step to nationalism or even war.
The benefits that immigration can bring to societies with shrinking labor and tax bases are often overlooked. Instead, the right focuses on immigrants, especially North African Muslims, who benefit from handouts and change the face, habits and culture of urban communities.
“We have the courage and the sense to say that if France becomes a country for everyone, it will no longer be a country for anyone,” Mr. Bardella said last week. “With the relaxation of immigration controls, totalitarian Islamism orders its fanatics not only to secede from the French Republic, but to conquer it in order to impose its laws and morals.”
Badella accused Macron of wanting to expand the EU from 27 to 37 member states, including “Islamist” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey, and of intending to give up France's veto over EU foreign policy decisions.
In fact, Turkey's accession negotiations have long been deadlocked, and Macron is obsessed with French sovereignty. Badla's tone was mild, but it concealed his intention to distort the facts at any time.
He has sought to downplay his party’s long-standing close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin with ambiguity, a policy that has now been amended despite the party’s repeated pro-Russian votes in the European Parliament, for example, when it voted against a resolution in 2021 supporting Ukraine’s “independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity”.
If Bardella spent his campaign stressing that France would “die,” Macron has also been making apocalyptic statements recently, warning that Europe would “die” if it failed to achieve “strategic autonomy.”
The difference is that Bardella believes that the way to save the EU is to have less Europe, not more Europe. The European elections will also be a weathervane for the European idea itself.
“I’m afraid people won’t vote for Ms. Le Pen because of her name and her father and all that,” said Jacky Laquay, a retired factory worker who attended a recent rally in Bardella in northern France. “Bardella represents the future of France.”
Of course, it seems unlikely that Mr. Badella will disappear from politics any time soon. “He’s 28 years old and has 40 years of political career ahead of him,” Mr. Kamius said. “This is no small matter.”
