To understand who Jordan Bardella is and how it is possible that, at just 28 years old, with no studies and hardly any political experience, he has become the great hope of the far right, we must look at what he is not. Despite his closeness to the Le Pen clan, he is not a Le Pen. That surname is linked to the National Front, now National Rally (RN), a party that, despite the efforts of the current leader, Marine Le Pen, to clean it up, remains associated with the darkest past of a movement created by former collaborators and pro-Nazis.
Although Bardella’s life and career (born in Drancy, in the north-east of Paris) are inseparable from his political boss and godmother, his youth also allows him to disassociate himself from that burden. He was not yet born when Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, described the gas chambers as a “detail” of World War II. He was seven years old when the then party leader managed in 2002, for the first time, to qualify the then National Front for the second round of the presidential election, which he ended up losing by an overwhelming majority to Jacques Chirac.
“You look to the past. I look to the future,” Bardella has consistently responded to those who question the origins of the RN during the campaign for the legislative elections that end this Sunday. Bardella hopes to become Prime Minister after these elections. If he succeeds, he would be the first far-right politician in the country to come to power through democratic means.
The ‘Mr. Clean’ of the far right
He shock The shock that Jean-Marie Le Pen caused in 2002 has turned into a scare 22 years later. The result, in large part, of a Bardella who is always immaculate, smiling in front of the cameras, with gentle gestures and controlled messages: it is rare for him to deviate from his well-rehearsed lines or to make an inappropriate gesture. It is the ideal son-in-law which could lead to the far-right party in which he has had a meteoric career (he was already its spokesman at the age of 22, at 23, head of the list for the European elections, and president of the party since he was 26) obtaining an absolute majority of 289 seats to form a government. The polls consider this to be increasingly difficult given the cordon sanitaire of the other parties, but not impossible.
It is, in any case, the culmination of a process of de-demonization of the party launched by Marine Le Pen in 2011 and which has in Bardella its greatest asset: a tailor-made successor capable of attracting the sectors that continued to escape the RN, especially the young.
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Is he “Mr Clean of the French far right,” Pierre-Stéphane Fort, journalist and author of the biography, tells Morning Express The great replacement. The hidden face of Jordan Bardella, for which researched for over a year. Bardella, he explains, is the fruit of an intense “communication campaign” and years of training. In the book, a communications specialist reveals that he was tasked with making the leader a “nice facho”, a friendly fascist. “The facade has changed. The RN has given itself a coat of paint called Bardella. But it is the tree that hides the forest, and that forest is still very dark,” warns Fort, who describes in his book the radical figures of the RN who have accompanied Bardella both within the party, which he joined at the age of 16, and in his sentimental life, also linked to the RN. “To this day, he remains surrounded by collaborators with identity ideas,” he says. “It is his universe, his history, what he has chosen.”
The perfect story
Bardella does not talk about that past. What he never tires of telling is his childhood in the cited Gabriel Péri, a neighborhood in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, the poorest in France, and with the most immigrants. How he grew up there with his mother, a divorcee who had trouble making ends meet, in a neighborhood where drugs were rampant and gunshots rang out. “That sells,” sigh Sofiane and Laure Azar. The thirty-something couple lives in this neighborhood of modest but neat buildings and a 10-minute walk from the metro that quickly takes you to the center of Paris. That there is violence linked to drug dealing is undeniable, they acknowledge, pointing to the young people stationed at the entrances to the cited to warn if the police are approaching. “But this is not Marseille,” they say, referring to the suburbs taken over by drug traffickers in the south of the country. Bardella “amplifies” the problems, agrees a municipal councilor who knew him as a teenager and prefers not to give his name.
Besides, Saint-Denis is not the whole story, Fort points out. “As in a product of marketingthere is a part that is true and another that has been completely erased,” says the journalist about the conveniently forgotten figure of the father, a businessman “who makes a very good living” and who paid for the private Catholic school where he studied, trips to the United States, a car and even a small apartment at the age of 20. “Jordan is not Cosette and her childhood would not have inspired a social novel by Victor Hugo or Émile Zola,” Fort sums up, alluding to the character of The MiserablesBardella also fails to mention that he now has an apartment in Garches, near the mansion of the late singer Johnny Hallyday and, above all, the Montretout mansion which is the Le Pen family and political stronghold in this area on the outskirts of Paris where the richest people in the country live.
The unmemorable passage through Brussels
If the memory of Bardella is vague in Saint-Denis, it is also blurred in Brussels, despite having been a MEP for five years. The only committee he belongs to is the Petitions committee, a kind of citizen service window of the European Parliament without legislative capacity. And even there, his vice-president, the Galician MEP Ana Miranda (BNG) confirms. “Nothing, he has done nothing, honestly, I have never seen him in my life. We have consulted the minutes and he has never voted in committee,” she says by telephone. In five years, he has presented a single resolution (to condemn Hamas) and has been the shadow rapporteur of a single report, when the majority of MEPs collaborate on dozens. However, Fort remembers: “He has systematically refused to vote in favour of sanctions against Vladimir Putin, he has often voted against aid to Ukraine (…), all his positions as a MEP have been pro-Putin.” Bardella has used Brussels “as a platform,” Miranda sums up.
From lion cub to Le Pen’s dolphin
Because Bardella has always had Paris as her goal. “Marine Le Pen’s goal at the head of the RN is to find a successor, which is why there is no competition between the two. Bardella is the culmination of Le Pen’s work,” says Kevin Pfeffer, a member of the party’s executive. For once, Fort agrees: “I don’t think there is any rivalry between them,” he says. Especially since, at least for the moment, it is Le Pen who remains the “real leader of the RN” and “the entire party is totally loyal to her.”
Things could change. Le Pen likes to say that he had a lion cub as the image associated with Bardella’s phone number. When he was appointed president of the RN in 2022, he changed it to an adult lion. “He is a political animal,” he says. Lions can roar loudly. But that time has not yet come, Fort believes. For now, Le Pen “decides and he repeats what he is told to say.” And if Bardella arrives, after the elections this Sunday, in Matignon, the seat of the French prime minister, Fort bets, “he will go in duo with Marine, she will be there all the time. She will be the real boss.”
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