Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s darling who has catapulted the extreme right in Europe

This Sunday’s success was more or less predicted. Bardella has served a fundamental role in the party’s attempts to renew itself and reap success among young people French, to whom the extreme right of the Le Pen clan had never addressed itself directly. The young man has championed a new RN that softens the eminently racist discourse of his predecessors and, instead, prioritizes pocketbook issues, immigration and criticism of the European Union.

The plan has worked. If these European elections have confirmed the advance of reactionary forces throughout the continent, in the French case the ultra vote has changed the color of the vast majority of the country’s constituencies. The failure of Europe’s Need—the Government’s proposal—has been absolute, and in the face of its 14.6% support, a General Grouping has emerged that has won over 31.4% of the French. To such an extent that the president, Emmanuel Macronimmediately called legislative elections for the end of this month, something that the national press has read as an ordeal.

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

But who is Jordan Bardella, that young man who is surfing on the crest of the reactionary wave? The winner of the French European Championships is son of an Italian 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 roots, and incorporate them into their political discourse. Part of its role in renewing the image of the RN involves reconfiguring the party’s messages. For this reason, Bardella speaks as a migrant who has lived with migrants and, from his experience – questioned by some -, he boasts of having grown up in “a land of islam, with an open road to crimes and trafficking. I dedicate myself to politics because of everything I have seen there, so that all of France does not become my old neighborhood. What was happening there was not normal,” he said during the campaign.

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

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

Faced with the possibility of taking the success of the RN to the top, Bardella is not going to settle for his seat in Brussels—which he already achieved in 2019—. Everything indicates that the far-right leader is also the candidate of his party to occupy the Hôtel de Matignon – residence of the French prime minister – after the legislative elections. In the party, it is taken for granted: the vice-president of the RN, Sébastien Chenu, declared on Monday afternoon to RTL Radio that, indeed, Bardella will be the bet of the match of Le Pen in the elections.

On Sunday, from the party headquarters, the young far-right leader pronounced: “These elections mark the first day of the post-Macron era“. And the polls do not deny it. The first poll for the legislative elections indicated on Monday that the RN could obtain between 235 and 265 of the 577 seats in the French Lower House. These seats could be added to obtain half of the hemicycle the supports of Reconquestthe party of Éric Zemmour and led by Marion Maréchal, also Marine Le Pen’s niece.

[Macron convoca elecciones legislativas tras la victoria aplastante de la extrema derecha en las europeas]

On Sunday, Maréchal declared that “a right-wing coalition seems more necessary than ever to me.” On Monday at noon, Bardella did not show disagreement: the great winner of the European Championships in France acknowledged that talks are already being held to form a alliance of far-right parties facing the parliamentarians.