France likes revolutions, and in Jordan Bardella, 28, it has found a mild-mannered, impeccably dressed insurgent who promises to radically change the country’s politics to save it from “disappearance.”
Bardella, president of the National Rally, is the beloved disciple of Marine Le Pen, 55, the eternal far-right presidential candidate. Once she called him “lion cub”; Now she calls him “the lion.” A clean-cut, strong-jawed TikTok star known for her love of sweets has certainly proven a sure hand in the French political jungle.
As Sunday’s European Parliament elections approach, Bardella, who led his party’s campaign, appears poised for a victory that could reshape French politics. An Ipsos poll published last week gave the National Rally around 33 percent of the vote, more than double the 16 percent of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party.
Even if the effective power of the European Union’s only directly elected body were limited, this would be a crude repudiation of the French leader. As in the rest of Europe, the normalization of the far right has advanced rapidly.
It is as if a fractured France, tired of politics as usual and anxious about its future, had abruptly discovered a more acceptable version of the xenophobic politics that had long presented the National Rally as a direct threat to French democracy. It has helped that Bardella is young, possesses a reassuring showmanship and does not bear the name Le Pen.
In fact, his success has been such that a leadership battle is looming. For now, Le Pen and his prodigal son are a seemingly harmonious and cuddling duo (Bardella is dating Le Pen’s niece, Nolwenn Olivier). But Bardella’s popularity is such that there is a chance the child prodigy could eclipse his creator.
Le Pen stubbornly maintains the hope of becoming president in 2027, when Macron’s term ends. She has said she would make Bardella her prime minister if he became president.
“The moderate conservative right is dead in France and, for the first time, it is possible that the National Rally will come to power,” said Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist who studies nationalist movements in Europe.
Raised by his mother, an Italian immigrant, in the northern suburbs of Paris, Bardella marks a break from the elite-school-trained technocrats who have dominated French politics. He has reformulated – some would say sweetened – the angry message of the nationalist right so effectively that there is talk of “Bardellamania.”
“Our civilization can die,” Bardella told a flag-waving crowd of more than 5,000 supporters last week, chanting “Jordan! “Jordan!” He resounded in a large stadium in Paris. “It can die because it will be submerged by migrants who will have changed our customs, culture and way of life irreversibly.”
Bardella’s campaign manager, Alexandre Loubet, stated that in the event of a clear National Rally victory, the party would “demand the dissolution of the National Assembly” and new elections. “If Mr. Macron has a minimum of respect for the will of the French people,” Loubet said, “he would do it.”
Macron, who is term-limited and has three more years in office, is unlikely to do such a thing, regardless of the outcome.
In Bardella’s telling, always level-headed, Macron has led France into the abyss through rampant immigration, a lax approach to anarchy and violence, the loss of French identity, and “punitive” ecological change. that makes life unaffordable. .
“Everything is going from bad to worse,” said Alain Foy, a janitor who attended Bardella’s rally in Paris. “Sometimes I can’t believe what’s happening, whether it’s immigration, purchasing power, insecurity, everything.” His sister, Marie Foy, added: “France is falling apart.”
Foy said that in the past, anyone who disagreed with the National Rally would quickly label Le Pen a racist or fascist. “But with Bardella,” he said, “the good thing is that he thinks the same, but you can’t call him racist because he is an immigrant son of Italian parents.”
The exact nature of Bardella’s upbringing in the suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis is unclear. He has portrayed it as a childhood of relentless hardship in projects affected by drug trafficking and violence, where you could be killed for denying someone a cigarette, and where his mother, who separated from his father when he was one year old, struggled to make ends meet. .
However, Bardella attended a private school, the Lycée Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle, where his expenses were paid by his father, who had a small business renting coffee and vending machines, said Pascal Humeau, who close to Mr. Bardella for many years.
Bardella proved to be a good student with strong political convictions and in 2012, at the age of 16, he enrolled in the party he now leads, which was then called the National Front. He was hospitalized for a week at the local police station, an experience that seems to have contributed to his political orientation.
“It wasn’t a working-class upbringing, that’s clear, but it wasn’t privileged in any way either,” Camus said. Although she had graduated with distinction from high school, Bardella dropped out of college to focus on politics, essentially the only job she has ever done.
With his deliberate manner and charismatic appearance, he was quickly identified in Le Pen’s entourage as the ideal representative of a reinvented National Rally, stripped of the anti-Semitic invective of its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who called the Holocaust a “ detail” of the story.
Le Pen, determined to bring her party into the mainstream, pushed it forward. Humeau, a former journalist, became Bardella’s media trainer in 2018. In him, he discovered a “quite sad young man, who repeats Ms. Le Pen’s formulas, an empty shell, very controlled, but who knows little about what’s happening”. in France or in the world.”
Mr. Bardella, however, learned quickly. He learned to smile and appear more relaxed, retaining an air of “consensual humility” before becoming what Humeau called “today’s media beast that scares his opponents.”
To what end? I asked. “He has had one goal since he was 17: to become prime minister and president,” Humeau said, “and I don’t think anyone can derail him.”
If Bardella has managed to present a softer side to the National Rally, then there is little or no evidence that his own views or those of the party have moderated.
Mass immigration (some 5.1 million migrants will enter the European Union in 2022, more than double the previous year) is the central issue of the European elections, polls show, along with the struggles of French families to make ends meet while the war in Ukraine has driven up energy and food prices.
In this context, the National Rally has successfully presented itself as the home of French patriotism, the party of people reasonably concerned that immigration is out of control.
With his Italian background, Bardella has been able to argue that the problem is not immigration itself, but the refusal of many immigrants to assimilate. On the left, the very word patriotism in France tends to be viewed with skepticism, a first step towards nationalism and even war.
The benefits that immigrants can bring to societies with shrinking workforces and tax bases are often overlooked. Instead, the right’s focus is on immigrants, particularly North African Muslims, who benefit from donations and change the appearance, habits and cultures of urban neighborhoods.
“We have the courage and lucidity to say that if France becomes everyone’s country, it will no longer be anyone’s nation,” Bardella said last week. “With the deregulation of migration, totalitarian Islam not only gives its fanatics the order to separate from the French Republic, but also to conquer it, to impose its laws and morals.”
Bardella has accused Macron of wanting to expand the European Union from 27 members to 37, including the Turkey “of Islamist President” Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and of trying to give up France’s veto over EU foreign policy decisions.
Indeed, Turkey’s EU accession talks have long been frozen and Macron’s attachment to French sovereignty is fierce. The softness of Bardella’s tone can mask a willingness to bend the truth.
He has tried, with vague evasions, to downplay his party’s former closeness to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a policy now revised, despite his party’s repeated pro-Russian votes in the European Parliament. In 2021, for example, he voted against a resolution supporting Ukraine’s “independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
If Bardella has been campaigning raising the specter of the “death” of France, Macron has also been speaking in apocalyptic terms of late, warning of the “death” of Europe if it does not achieve “strategic autonomy.”
The difference is that Bardella believes that salvation lies in less Europe, not more. The European elections will also be a reference for the European idea itself.
“I’m worried that people won’t vote for Ms. Le Pen because of her name, with her father and all that,” said Jacky Laquay, a retired factory worker who recently attended a Bardella rally in northern France. “Bardella embodies the future of France.”
Certainly, it seems unlikely that Bardella will disappear from the political scene anytime soon. “At 28 years old, he has 40 years of political life ahead of him,” Camus said. “That’s nothing”.