At 28, Jordan Bardella aims to become the first far-right head of government in France, a hypothesis that has become credible as he has managed to embody the de-demonization strategy of his party, the National Rally (RN).
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Accession to this position in the event of an absolute majority seems to be just another “first” for the one whom relatives see as the “adopted son” of Marine Le Pen, the figurehead of the RN, himself heir to the National Front.
His political career has been dazzling since he joined the National Front in 2012, at the age of 17. The party was co-founded in 1972 by two former Waffen-SS members and Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who chose the same emblem as the Italian neo-fascist party: a tricolour flame.
In 2019, when Marine Le Pen gave up on leading the RN list – which changed its name the previous year – in the European elections, it was to this unknown person who had no diploma except the baccalaureate, that this fell. responsibility.
Arriving at the top of the poll in front of the camp of President Emmanuel Macron, Jordan Bardella thus began his political career with a bang, one Sunday evening in May 2019.
With his first name, inherited like “Steve” or “Kevin”, from TV soap operas imported from the United States in the 1990s, a “popular marker”, he says, of his childhood in the suburbs of Paris – between a mother employed in a school, who raised him, and his father boss of a small business, whom he sees every other weekend – and a surname that refers to Italian immigration of the 20th century, he intends to present the new face of a rejuvenated and modernized extreme right.
“Three of his four grandparents were born” in Italy, a “country often described as a European political laboratory”, underlines the daily The world.
One of his grandmothers was the daughter of an Algerian immigrant worker who settled in the Lyon region in the early 1930s, according to a Jeune Afrique investigation published Monday.
Complementary duo
Spokesperson for Marine Le Pen’s third campaign for the presidential elections in 2022, Jordan Bardella proved to be as loyal as he was essential, and was elected in November to head the RN, which is no longer, at least officially, led by a member of the Le Pen family, a first.
But it is indeed a “complementary duo” that the young new boss with a million and a half subscribers on TikTok, and his elder Marine Le Pen, are putting together.
For her, the “neither-right-nor-left” discourse and the opposition between “popular” and “elite” blocs. It’s up to him to make his nuances heard, “a little more right-wing, a little more liberal,” says an RN deputy.
Is Bardellism a Lepenism? In any case, both reject the slightest divergence, even to the point of bad faith.
PHOTO Stephane De Sakutin / AFP
When the MEP spoke out against minimum agricultural prices, in a spectacular contradiction with the party’s orthodoxy, Marine Le Pen defended her protégé, to the astonishment of the movement’s leaders.
And he will affirm that Jean-Marie Le Pen “was not” anti-Semitic, before going back on his statements, while the far-right leader obsessed with immigration and Jews had been condemned several times for his excesses, notably describing the gas chambers as a “detail of history”.
It “would have been complicated to say the opposite to Marine”, those close to her had tried to justify a posteriori.
No matter: Bardella brings, supported by opinion studies, a new electorate to the Lepenist base hitherto crushed by a glass ceiling. Young people, executives, urban people, retirees, all categories historically hostile to the RN are gradually offering their confidence to the party.
The one who has made his plasticity almost a doctrine intends to appear as smooth and shiny as the gomina which impeccably flattens his hair in all circumstances.
In September 2023, Marine Le Pen announces that if she gains access to the Élysée, she will make Jordan Bardella her prime minister.
