Bardella, Le Pen’s strongman who aspires to be France’s first ultra-right ruler since WWII

Success was more or less expected: on June 9, his RN became the first French political force in the European elections. The success of this party, as rooted as it is controversial, in 2024 is in some way explained by the figure of Bardella. The Parisian has played a fundamental role in the party’s attempts to renew itself and reap success among young people French, whom the far-right Le Pen clan had never addressed directly. The young man has championed a new RN that softens the eminently racist discourse of his predecessors and instead prioritises issues of pocketbook, immigration and criticism of the European Union.

The plan worked. If these European elections confirmed the advance of reactionary forces across the continent, in the French case the far-right vote changed the colour of the vast majority of the country’s constituencies. The failure of Necessity for Europe – the government’s proposal – was absolute, and in the face of its 14.6% of support, a National Rally emerged that won over 31.4% of French people. The immediate call for elections by the president, Emmanuel Macronwas nothing more than proof that the resounding success of the extreme right had shaken the entire country.

[Tensión en el primer debate de las legislativas francesas por los impuestos y la inmigración]

But who is Jordan Bardella, the young man who is riding the crest of the reactionary wave? The winner of the French European Championships is son of an Italian woman from Turin who emigrated to France, and who raised him in the social housing of Gabriel Péri, in the suburban municipality of Saint Denis —one of the areas with the highest rates of poverty and conflict in all of France.

Bardella knows how to use his working class and immigrant rootsand incorporate them into his political discourse. Part of his role in renewing the image of the RN involves reconfiguring the party’s messages. That is why Bardella speaks like a migrant who has lived with migrants and, from his experience – questioned by some – boasts of having grown up in “a land of Islamismwith a path open to crime and trafficking. I am going into politics because of what I have seen there, so that the whole of France does not become my old neighbourhood. What was happening there was not normal,” he said during his campaign.

The far-right politician entered politics in 2012, at the age of 17, influenced by the 2005 anti-racist riots in the French suburbs. He immediately joined the far-right party National Frontthen led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. In 2014, he was appointed departmental secretary of the party in Seine-Saint-Denis, where the far right has a marginal presence, says Antonio Torres del Cerro in EfeIn 2020, he began a relationship with one of Jean-Marie’s granddaughters, Nolwenn Olivier.

On the same level as her mother, she puts Marine, Jean-Marie’s daughter. Bardella speaks of both of them as two women “to whom I owe everything.” And this is known in the RN: Bardella’s intimate relationship with the head of the French far right has been the key to this Sunday’s election. At the end of 2022, Marine Le Pen She chose him as president of the RN, something that has been the subject of criticism and debate due to the excessive prominence that the leader has given her pupil.

Faced with the possibility of taking the RN’s success to the top, Bardella will not be satisfied with his seat in Brussels – which he already won in 2019. Everything points to the far-right leader also being his party’s candidate to occupy the Hôtel de Matignon – the residence of the French Prime Minister – after the legislative elections. Within the party, it is taken for granted: RN vice-president Sébastien Chenu declared on Monday evening to RTL Radio that Bardella would indeed be the candidate will be the bet of the match of Le Pen in the elections.

On Sunday, from the party headquarters, the young far-right leader said: “These elections mark the first day of the post-Macron era“And the polls do not contradict this. The first survey ahead of the legislative elections indicated on Monday that the RN could obtain between 235 and 265 of the 577 seats in the French lower house. To these seats, the support of Reconquestthe party of Éric Zemmour and led by Marion Maréchal, also Marine Le Pen’s niece.

[El mapa de Francia que asusta a Europa: así ha arrasado la extrema derecha de Le Pen el 9-J]

On Sunday, Maréchal declared that “a right-wing coalition seems more necessary than ever to me.” On Monday afternoon, Bardella did not disagree: the great winner of the European elections in France acknowledged that talks are already underway to form one. alliance of far-right parties in view of the parliamentary elections.