Jordan Bardella: The smart up-and-comer by Le Pen’s grace

Jordan Bardella from the extreme right RN could become France’s new Prime Minister in a few weeks. And he is only 28 years old. Who is the man – and what explains his rise?

Jordan Bardella comes from “Neuf Trois”, the notorious 93rd department of France, the poorest in the country. “Seine Saint Denis” is located in the north-east of Paris, and nowhere else are there as many people with an immigrant history as here.

Bardella is himself the child or grandchild of immigrants. His mother, an Italian, came to France in the 1960s. His French father has Algerian-Italian roots.

The origin – his capital

Bardella makes political capital out of this. He enjoys a particularly high level of credibility when he talks about the suburbs. He likes to say that his youth was a gauntlet of drug dealers at the foot of his high-rise block.

Following the unrest that emanated from the banlieue last year, he explained: “All this is all the more frustrating because there are people like me who come from these neighborhoods and who have managed to integrate fully.”

In his speeches, Bardella often mentions his mother, a kindergarten assistant with whom he grew up. At the end of the month, she often only had 20 euros left, he says. The story appeals to audiences.

Two versions of his youth

Bardella does not mention in these speeches that his father is the head of a medium-sized vending machine company. According to media reports, the young Jordan spent weekends with him, flew with him on holiday to Miami on his 18th birthday, and received his first car, a Smart, from him as a gift.

Bardella also fails to mention that he did not go to one of the state lycées around the corner from his apartment block, but took his A-levels at a fee-paying Catholic private school a little further away.

These are details that he deliberately leaves out. They don’t fit well with the underdog image that is part of his success.

Unexpected change

Some of Bardella’s schoolmates still cannot understand why he ended up joining the extreme right-wing Front National, the forerunner of today’s Rassemblement National. They told the newspaper “Le Monde” that he was a young man who felt very comfortable in the multicultural school class full of ambitious immigrant children.

For a while, Bardella, a student, even taught migrants French in his free time. But then he turned to the party, which has a racist and anti-Semitic past. At 17, he became a party member.

Only a short time later, his meteoric career began at Marine Le Pen’s side. It probably also helped that he quickly formed private ties with Le Pen’s close confidants. Gossip magazines reported that he was with her niece Nolwenn.

Bardella becomes Le Pen’s political adopted son. She recognizes his talent, the value of his origins in the banlieues. He owes her everything.

Through “Marine” he discovered politics and decided to get involved, he describes her influence: “She instilled in me a passion for our wonderful people.”

Rapid rise

In 2017, at just 22 years old, Bardella became one of three party spokespersons, having already abandoned his geography studies. In 2019, Le Pen appointed him as the lead candidate in the European elections. Even then, Bardella narrowly beat President Emmanuel Macron’s list.

He will become party leader in 2022. He embodies the new, de-demonized Rassemblement National. Bardella propagates a tough law and order policy. At his campaign meetings before the European elections, he calls for “the return of state sovereignty over every square meter of France”. Immigration and the EU threaten the “soul of France”.

Whether it is the “Green Deal” or the immigration pact, the decisions in Brussels are a form of bullying of the country; the country is facing “annihilation” and “French identity and sovereignty” are at stake.

He dramatically hurls into the hall: “We have not stopped being French!”

The RN – Protector of the Jews?

The masses cheer him on. To get there, Bardella has prescribed himself tough media training in the past. For a long time he was considered a talking machine, a robot, but today he gives in to the selfie frenzy of his followers with a smile and rarely stumbles.

At the end of last year was such a moment. In an interview with BFMTV, he explained that he did not believe that the founding father of the party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was an anti-Semite. He was convicted of anti-Semitism, and his own daughter Marine had thrown him out of the party in 2015 because of this.

Bardella later backtracked. The lithe 28-year-old suffered no political damage. On the contrary, he declared the extreme right-wing Rassemblement National to be the only true protector of the Jews against the Islamists in the country.

For him, the root of the problem is and remains immigration. And he scores points with supposedly simple solutions. The only solution “in the face of the chaos that immigration is causing us now and in the future,” he exclaims, “is toughness and determination, always.”

Strong support among young voters

For his party, the tall, broad-shouldered, always neatly coiffed and well-dressed Bardella is worth his weight in gold. At the end of 2023, he was among the 50 most popular personalities in the country. 1.6 million people follow him on TikTok. Almost a third of 18- to 24-year-olds voted for him in the European elections.

And he played a decisive role in ensuring that the RN was able to gain significant support in almost all sections of the electorate in the European elections: not only among young people, but also among those with higher levels of education and pensioners.

With him at the helm, his party came first in 93 percent of municipalities in the European elections.

Switched to statesman mode

Since President Macron called for new elections, Bardella has switched to a different mode: from campaigner to statesman. He is successfully negotiating with the conservative Republican splitter, Eric Ciotti, about a joint list of candidates. He patiently explains that in the event of an election victory in early July, he will first implement an emergency plan: for more purchasing power, less immigration and more security.

There is no longer any talk of repealing Macron’s pension reform, which introduced a retirement age of 64. In view of the horrendous national debt, the plan will now be to change the reform so that everyone who started working under the age of 20 can retire at 60, he explains.

Bardella, the polemicist and agitator, has been the voice of reason since the election. The career step to become prime minister does not seem to worry the shooting star of the extreme right.