Jordan Bardella, 28, ever closer to Matignon since the success of the National Rally in the first round of the legislative elections, has established himself as the darling child and incarnation of Le Penism without even bearing its name.
Since the announcement of the dissolution, he has tried his hand at three-piece suits whose austerity should underline seriousness and rigor.
He has also sometimes had to turn away those who brandish their phones at each of his appearances: almost heartbreaking for the one who has made this selfie strategy a trademark for months to establish his popularity.
A few days before a possible accession to Matignon, it is a question of rebalancing this image of a pop star with shirts and jackets that are ever tighter, surrounded by groupies at every gala outing, and of presenting the face of a putative Prime Minister of France.
In mid-June, Marine Le Pen confirmed that it would be he, and not she, who would become head of government if she won a majority in the Assembly.
After fifty years of penism, it is therefore a former poster paster not even thirty years old who must install the extreme right in power.
“Marine Le Pen considers him a spiritual son,” believes a member of parliament close to both. Almost an advantage in this family where blood ties have never prevented betrayals and rancour.
Bardella, the heir of the clan? The young man likes to play the ingenue “born in 1995” to better refer the sulphurous past of the National Front and the excesses of Jean-Marie Le Pen to a bygone history.
A big string which sometimes breaks, notably when he explained in November that the founder of the FN was “not anti-Semitic”, despite the legal convictions. Faced with the scandal, he is forced to backpedal.
– From identitarians to sovereignists –
The one who presents himself today as the leader of the camp of “reason” and “moderation” in the face of “extremism” nevertheless linked his adolescence and youth to pure, even radical, Lepenism.
At 18, he queued to get a photo alongside the “devil of the Republic”, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Later, it was under the watchful eye of Frédéric Chatillon, a figure in the Union Defense Group (GUD) in the 90s, that Jordan Bardella began his political apprenticeship, while establishing an intimate relationship with his daughter.
The student Bardella, who enrolled in geography school after his eco baccalaureate with honors, frequents the same bars as the “identitarians” of his generation, on the left bank in Paris. And it was with Philippe Vardon, a former leader of the small ultra-right group Bloc Identitaire, that he learned at the National Rally.
The Saint-Denis activist, who took out his card in 2012, was quickly spotted by the party with the flame: he embodies the new look Le Penism dear to the new president of the movement.
Descendant of Italian immigrants, the young man also understands the advantage he can gain from his “merit” path in the middle of the bars of this deprived northern suburb of the capital, son of a divorced nursery school agent. Without insisting on his father, a prosperous SME boss who offers him a car and rents him an apartment.
At 20, Jordan Bardella is already a regional RN councillor for Île-de-France, after having quickly left the lecture halls. A few months earlier, he was the parliamentary assistant to Jean-François Jalkh, a cog as far-right as he is essential in the Front National machine.
But it was without difficulty, if not with zeal, that he then followed in the footsteps of the all-powerful number two of the party, Florian Philippot, slayer of the identitarians and champion of sovereignty with social overtones.
– Black Box –
At the National Rally, his plasticity is appreciated.
A first consecration came in 2019, when Marine Le Pen offered him the head of the list in the European elections. By exceeding the macronie’s score, Jordan Bardella washes away the insult of his boss’s failed debate against Emmanuel Macron two years earlier.
He then found a new mentor, Philippe Olivier, brother-in-law and main advisor to Marine Le Pen, while starting a relationship with his daughter, Nolwenn Olivier, which has now ended – the young man has since adopted great discretion over his private life.
Spokesperson for candidate Le Pen in 2022, Jordan Bardella impresses with his media ease and his agility in debates. “He learns quickly,” they whisper at the RN. His detractors describe a “Frankenstein” who absorbs, digests and then regurgitates the elements of language, and whose oratorical talent would hide, at best, a doctrinal void.
Even “right-wing positions”, as expressed by the RN mayor of Hénin-Beaumont, Steeve Briois, when the MEP takes the head of the National Rally in 2023, warning against a “potential re-radicalization” of the party . Was it not the same Bardella who had estimated that “Didier Raoult is to medicine” what the RN is “to politics”?
Marine Le Pen cuts short any rebellion: the young man must broaden his electoral base blocked under a glass ceiling. To the neither-right-nor-left Le Penist, Jordan Bardella thus makes his more liberal and pro-business nuance heard. “Complementarity”, swear the two.
“Between them, it’s a black box, we don’t know what’s going on,” notes an RN MP. For his part, the young man emphasizes his deference as much as his singularity, seeking to thwart the dire fate that the party with the flame has always reserved for its number twos.
But the prodigy of Le Penism is also, in a certain sense, that of Macronism.
Emmanuel Macron had in fact opened the way by breaking the codes of politics and placing young people in charge.
Jordan Bardella does not hesitate to place himself as a mirror image of Gabriel Attal, whom he has made his best enemy.
Last month, during a debate with Macronist Valérie Hayer, he did not hesitate to use formulas that candidate Macron had thrown at his rival Le Pen during their presidential debates.
The dissolution has nevertheless plunged the disruptor Jordan Bardella into an abyss of questions: if he were to be appointed to Matignon, cohabitation could undermine Marine Le Pen’s chances of victory in 2027.
His acquired governmental experience would also fuel his own Elysian pretensions more than ever.
Is it this dizziness that led him last week to affirm that he would refuse the post in the event of a simple relative majority? Unless it is a question of betting that an unmanageable National Assembly will lead to the resignation of Emmanuel Macron. So that everything goes (almost) as planned again.
