At 28, Jordan Bardella is the star of the French far right

Photo: Julien De Rosa Agence France-PResse “I will be the prime minister of all French people,” he declared on Sunday evening.

Paul Aubriat – Agence France-Presse in Paris

Published yesterday at 4:01 p.m.

• Europe

28 years old, Jordan Bardella, ever closer to the post of prime minister after the success of the far right in the first round of legislative elections in France, has managed to embody the normalization strategy of his party, the National Rally (RN).

The accession to Matignon 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 the heir of the National Front.

“I will be the prime minister of all French people,” he declared Sunday evening. “A prime minister of cohabitation, respectful of the Constitution”, but “intransigent”.

With more than 34% of the votes, the RN and its allies are ahead of the coalition of left of the New Popular Front (28-29%), far ahead of the camp of President Emmanuel Macron (20-21%) according to estimates.

His political itinerary has been dazzling since at the age of 17, in 2012, he took his card in the National Front, a party co-founded in 1972 by two former Waffen-SS and Marine Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had then chosen the same emblem as that of the Italian neofascist party: a tricolor 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 begins his political career with a bang, one Sunday evening in May 2019.

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He intends to present the new face of a rejuvenated and modernized extreme right: a first name inherited, like “Steve” or “Kévin”, from TV series imported from the United States in the 1990s, which he describes as a “popular marker”; a childhood in the suburbs of Paris – between a mother employed in a school, who raised him, and a father who was the owner of a small business, whom he saw every other weekend; and a surname that refers to Italian immigration in the 20th century.

“Three of his four grandparents were born” in Italy, a “country often described as a European political laboratory”, underlines the daily Le Monde.

< p>One of his grandmothers was the daughter of an Algerian immigrant worker who settled in the Lyon region (central-east) in the early 1930s, according to a Jeune Afrique investigation published Monday.

Also read

• The far right largely in the lead in France in the first round of the legislative elections
• Towards hard cohabitation in France in the event of victory for the far right
• “We are ready” to govern, assures Jordan Bardella

Complementary duo

Spokesperson for Marine Le Pen's third campaign for the 2022 presidential elections, Jordan Bardella is as loyal as he is 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.

To her, the “neither-right-nor-left” discourse and the opposition between “popular” and “elitist” blocs. It is up to him to make his nuances heard, “a little more right-wing, a little more liberal”, says an RN MP.

Is Bardellism a Lepenism ? Both reject in any case the slightest divergence, to the point of bad faith.

When the MEP speaks out against the agricultural floor prices, in a spectacular contradiction with the party's doxa, Marine Le Pen defends her foal, to the amazement of the movement's executives.

And he will affirm that Jean- Marie Le Pen “was not” anti-Semitic, before returning to her statements, while the far-right leader obsessed with immigration and Jews had been condemned several times for her excesses, notably describing the gas chambers as “point of detail of the story”.

It “would have been complicated to say the opposite with regard to Marine”, had tried a posteriori to justify his close.

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 in the party.

He who has made his plasticity almost a doctrine hears appear as smooth and shiny as the gomina which impeccably flattens her hair in all circumstances.

In September 2023, Marine Le Pen announces that if she accesses the Elysée , she will make Jordan Bardella her prime minister.