Twenty-nine years old, a good age to write your autobiography? Yes, answers Jordan Bardella by publishing What I'm looking for (Fayard, 316 pages, €22.90). In fact, despite a book that is too long with many repetition loops, it is not uninteresting to read a political figure recounting his personal journey in his own way. It also gives Jordan Bardella the opportunity to tackle fields that are unusual for him. “Even though I do not believe, I have not been baptized, I have always expressed a singular deference towards the faith and the believers”he reveals for example. But this work is above all an opportunity to question the political positioning of the president of the National Rally, Marine Le Pen's understudy since the 2019 European elections.
Far from the Le Pen Marine of 2017
Jordan Bardella claims it: he was a driving force in the alliance formed in the legislative elections between the RN and Éric Ciotti, whom he would have chosen as Minister of the Armed Forces if the far right had won the legislative elections and if he had been appointed in Matignon. This choice positions him in an internal ideological and strategic debate within the far right.
First option: embody an alternative “neither right nor left”, in other words represent a difference in nature with the Republicans, with no possible alliance with them. This was Marine Le Pen's line in the 2017 presidential election, combining external (protectionism) and internal (interventionism) anti-liberalism, and appealing between the two rounds to the electorate of Jean-Luc Mélenchon more than to that of François Fillon .
Second option: embody the “real right”, in other words represent a simple difference in nature with the Republicans, without incompatibility with them on economic policy. If Marine Le Pen always seems to oscillate between the two, the second option is clearly the choice of Jordan Bardella when he endorses “new directions” with the abandonment of the exit from the euro, or when it extends its hand to “orphans of a more Orleanist right”that is to say liberal in the typology of the historian René Rémond.
Line of demarcation with Éric Zemmour
If this line brings Jordan Bardella closer to Marion Maréchal (Identity Liberties) and Éric Zemmour (Reconquest!), the president of the RN nevertheless takes care to distance himself from both. From the first, he emphasizes that she embodies, like François-Xavier Bellamy (LR), “a more conservative sensitivity on social issues”. From the second, he explains that he takes up the “excess of yesterday’s National Front”.
There is precisely one thing that Jordan Bardella does not assume: the political heritage of the party he chairs following Jean-Marie Le Pen and then Marine Le Pen. “I know nothing about its history, its founders and even Jean-Marie Le Pen”pleads the one who nevertheless obtained a baccalaureate with honors with the political science option. Assuring: “ I am not far right. » According to him, the RN of today would have in fact broken with the FN of yesterday since Marine Le Pen rejected her father's comments on the gas chambers.
Except that Marine Le Pen does not say that her strategy of “demonization” was necessary because of the reality of a “sulphurous legacy”as Jordan Bardella writes, but because of an image that she considers caricatured by her adversaries. Which changes everything, because it denies that the historical roots, the convictions and the excesses of Jean-Marie Le Pen justified the initial “demonization”, the “cordon humaine” isolating lepenism for a long time.
Ultimately, what is Jordan Bardella “looking for”? An epigraph from Napoleon Bonaparte seems to give the answer even before the book's prologue: “What I seek above all is greatness: what is great is always beautiful. » But the author blurs the lines by quoting the artist Pierre Soulages further: “It’s what I do that teaches me what I’m looking for.” » A reference just as mysterious as the “incandescent stoicism” that he perceives from Marine Le Pen.
