Is Jordan Bardella the new face of Europe?

 

Is Jordan Bardella the new face of Europe?

 

Slick, disciplined and a hit with young voters, the president of France's National Rally is remaking the far-right party in his image.

 

By CLEA CAULCUTT

in Saint-Denis, France

https://www.politico.eu/article/jordan-bardella-france-far-right-european-election-2024/

MAY 31, 2024 4:00 AM CET

 

The French famously despise their politicians. Upstarts enjoy brief honeymoons before inevitably wilting under the public eye. Just a quarter of French people have confidence in their government or the National Assembly, according to a recent poll.

 

 Then there’s Jordan Bardella. The president of the far-right National Rally has weathered nearly a decade in politics, including five as his party’s most prominent member of the European Parliament, somehow without ever losing his luster.

 

As his party’s lead candidate for next week’s European Parliament election, the 28-year-old is dominating his rivals in the polls. Nearly a third of French voters plan to cast their ballots for the National Rally, according to POLITICO Poll of Polls — giving a party once treated as too-toxic-to-consider double the support of its nearest foe, French President Emmanual Macron’s Renaissance party.

 

Polished, composed to a fault, Bardella has become a TikTok sensation, deploying his boy-next-door good looks and a carefully practiced smile to turn out the youth vote. When the French weekly newspaper JDD compiled a list of the 50 most popular figures in France, Bardella was the only politician to make the list.

 

Bardella’s popularity, and a concurrent rise of the far right across the Continent, represent a potential sea change in European politics, as the firewalls that once kept out nationalist, Euroskeptic parties like the National Rally come crashing down.

 

“Nothing is preordained … [but] there is a scenario where we will face a post-traumatic moment in Europe after the elections,” said a heavyweight from Macron’s Renew group in the European Parliament. “There’s a real risk that Europe will be put on pause, with limited ambitions.”

 

Six of the 27 European Union governments, including Italy’s, include parties that once would have been considered far right. The Netherlands is set to join their ranks. While a strong showing in June’s election won’t usher the National Rally into the Elysée, the vote is widely seen as a barometer ahead of 2027 when the party —  headed most likely by its longtime leader Marine Le Pen —  is expected to make another run at the presidency.

 

In past elections, French voters have closed ranks to keep the far right out of power, erecting a so-called cordon sanitaire (or firewall) to keep the far right out of power.

 

Political observers believe that’s no longer a sure thing. If the National Rally does sweep into office in the next presidential election, it’ll be thanks in part to an effort to reposition itself as a safe, palatable alternative to the traditional parties of power — an effort personified by Bardella.

 

The making of a far-right leader

With his immaculate suits and tightly cropped hair, the far-right candidate has built up a far-right fandom who greet him with an ecstatic “Jordan!” at campaign stops and follow his tirades, perfectly timed jokes and talk show exploits on social media. French newspapers slap stories about him with headlines like “Bardella superstar,” “the makeover of the far right,” “ultrabright populism” and “the Bardella trap.”

 

Despite being dinged in the media and by political opponents for a light grasp of the issues, he has steadily widened the gap between him and Valérie Hayer, Macron’s candidate in the race. It helps that his political canvassing has been more boy band on tour, than grim campaigning, with endless TikTok posts and selfie poses with fans.

 

“There’s a ‘Bardella’ phenomenon,” said a political adviser from the rival conservative Les Républicains party. “People want to see Macron take a beating, and in a confusing way, he manages to appear as a new political proposition for the right and the far-right.”

 

In addition to being a hit with the young — kick-starting his campaign in a nightclub with drinks and a DJ  — Bardella has also made inroads with the old, a change-averse demographic his party has traditionally struggled with. According to an IFOP poll published in April, 23 percent of voters over 65 years old plan to vote for Bardella, up from 19 percent in 2019.

 

Even Bardella’s opponents grudgingly allow him respect. “I know him well, he’s no bogeyman,” said a heavyweight from Macron’s Renaissance party. “I’ve often got bags under my eyes, disheveled hair, but he’s always the same, with his suit and his neat hair.” Macron himself has crossed the cordon sanitaire to invite Bardella to join his regular cross-party political discussions.

 

Le Pen has described Bardella as a godsend in her effort to detoxify the party’s reputation and prepare it for power. He “is not affected by the taboo that surrounds the National Front vote,” she said, referring to the party’s former name, which was associated with her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Holocaust denier. “He’s part of a new generation.”

 

An acquaintance of Bardella’s described her impression of meeting him when he was 22 and already a full-fledged politician. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him not wearing a suit,” said the acquaintance, a former official of the Paris regional authority. “We never became friends but he was good at making conversation, at engaging in repartee without revealing much about himself.”

 

Bardella’s polish is no accident. Pascal Humeau, a former communication specialist with the National Rally who has since fallen out with the party, said the far-right candidate underwent intense media training. “He was an empty shell,” Humeau said in an interview with documentary Complément d’enquête. “In terms of the depth [of personality], he was pretty limited.”

 

“His ease, his enthusiasm, that you can feel today, we had to work on it for months and months,” Humeau said. He added that even Bardella’s smile and greetings were products of painstaking training.

 

How Marcon set the table for the far right

Born to a working-class family of Italian origins who came to France in the 1960s, Bardella grew up in public housing in the Gabriel Péri estate in Saint-Denis, an impoverished banlieue north of Paris that regularly makes the headlines as a rough-and-tumble outpost for drug trafficking and violent crime. He joined the National Rally as a teenager, dropping out of university to go into politics. His mother was a nursery assistant from Turin. His father, himself the son of an Italian immigrant, owned a drinks vending machine business.

 

During a visit to the local market, most people POLITICO spoke with had heard of the local boy making national headlines, but not a single one said they would vote for him.

 

When it comes to policy, Bardella sings from the National Rally hymn sheet, slamming drug-related crime and “rampant Islamism” in the French banlieues. He plays up his tough background as being in sharp contrast to many of Paris’ political elite.

 

 Critics however have cast doubt on Bardella’s perfect backstory in recent years, pointing out that his father was relatively well-off, able to offer him tuition at a good private school and holidays abroad.

 

Bardella was accused in January of having secretly shared racist comments on social media when he was a regional councilor in 2016. He has denied the allegations.

 

Saint-Denis is home to largely poor, immigrant and Muslim communities: More than 80 percent of voters in Saint-Denis voted for Macron and against Le Pen in the runoff round of the last presidential election. And yet, not all the residents of Saint-Denis disagree with all of Bardella’s positions.

 

“What he says is true,” said Mohamed Amrous, a shoe seller in the market. “Everybody thinks the same here. I’m a child of the French nation, and the situation is getting worse and worse. There’s more and more delinquency, insecurity and incivilities.” Amrous said he would never vote for the National Rally, but he agreed with Bardella that illegal migrants who are convicted of crimes should be deported.

 

France is no stranger to rising stars taking aim at the political establishment. It wasn’t so long ago that they elected one such throw-out-the-rulebook candidate as president. In 2017, Macron dynamited France’s political landscape, tearing down the country’s major political parties on his way to its highest office. By the time Macron was sworn in, only two major forces remained: his own and Le Pen’s, setting the table for the challenge Bardella is presenting today.

 

“The centrists see the National Rally as their only opponent,” said a former Socialist heavyweight. “It creates a bipolar political landscape, and yes it makes the alternative possible.”

 

A debate last week between Bardella and Macron’s 35-year-old French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal only reinforced that impression, with the two heir-apparents battling it out with their competing visions of Europe in a television appearance watched by 3.6 million viewers.

 

Bardella and Le Pen’s vision for Europe

Bardella and Le Pen have been working hard to remake the National Rally’s image; in another effort to distinguish herself from the most extremist elements of the far right, Le Pen pointedly broke with the far-right Alternative for Germany last week and reached out instead to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, a far-right leader who has successfully executed a pivot toward the center on the European stage.

 

But the change is mostly cosmetic, said Jean-Yves Camus, a specialist on the far right with the Paris-based think tank Fondation Jean Jaurès. While the National Rally has shed its most toxic traits, like the elder Le Pen’s antisemitism, its agenda remains the most radical in France, especially when it comes to international organizations.

 

“Their watchword is national sovereignty, and they refuse anything that would override the sovereignty of the people, and that means the EU and NATO,” said Camus. “They don’t like the International Criminal Court, nor the European Court of Human Rights. They want to unravel the EU from the inside.”

 

While the European Parliament election is relatively low stakes, a Le Pen victory in the 2027 presidential election would redraw the EU’s political landscape, adding France to the list of countries like Hungary and Slovakia that have challenged the establishment in Brussels by eschewing liberalism.

 

In Brussels, the National Rally has systematically opposed most of the big policy deals of the last ten years, including the EU’s Covid recovery fund, the European Green Deal and military assistance for Ukraine. Le Pen’s 2022 presidential platform included calls for France to exit NATO’s integrated military command. And while she has condemned the war in Ukraine, her party has abstained on key votes in France and in the European Parliament for support for Kyiv.  A 2023 French parliamentary report accused the National Rally of serving as a mouthpiece for the Kremlin.

 

Speaking to POLITICO in March, Bardella delivered a surprise saying that though the National Rally still wanted to leave NATO’s integrated command, it would only do so after the war in Ukraine was over. “You don’t change treaties in wartime,” Bardella said.

 

What could go wrong for Bardella

For the upcoming vote, the National Rally has successfully spun the election as a midterm referendum on Macron, rather than on the geopolitical threats facing Europe. European elections have become a “pressure valve moment,” said OpinionWay pollster Bruno Jeanbart. “It is an election difficult for a ruling party, where people generally express their anger or disappointment,” he said.

 

Facing assured defeat, Macron’s allies are already working to downplay its potential impact. Bardella is popular they say but he’s a passing fad. “He’s the catch-all vote, scooping up anger because we’ve been in power for almost ten years,” said a member of parliament for Macron’s Renaissance party.

 

Bardella’s weaknesses were on display in his debate with Attal. Though he has been a member of the European Parliament since 2019, he has rarely engaged with the chamber’s activities, tabling just 21 amendments during his mandate and mostly skipping debates. While he didn’t perform as poorly against Attal as Le Pen did against Macron in an embarrassing presidential debate in 2017, Bardella came across as stiff and ill at ease, uncomfortable when he had to grapple with substance or depart from his scripted responses.

 

“He’s attracting a maximum of voters by not taking a clear stance on anything,” said François-Xavier Bellamy, the lead candidate for the conservative Les Républicains. “But at some point, he’ll have to stop being vague.”

 

Even Bardella’s former allies describe him as shallow, more slick than substance. “I quickly saw his convictions were very malleable,” said Florian Philippot, Le Pen’s former right-hand man who left the party after the party’s defeat in the 2017 presidential election.

 

So far, voters don’t seem to care. A poll taken shortly after the debate with Attal showed support for Bardella not only undiminished but at a record high of 34 percent.

 

Bardella’s biggest vulnerability might be growing speculation that he’s on a collision course with Le Pen, in a party known for its quasi-Homeric leadership battles (to which Philippot can attest).

 

A recent poll also showed voters appeared to be swinging behind Bardella: 52 percent of National Rally voters would vote for Bardella, compared to 43 percent for Le Pen, according to an OpinionWay poll published this month.

 

While the two have been taking pains to present themselves as a team ticket, it’s an equilibrium that few believe is likely to last.

 

“There has never been a No. 2 at the National Rally,” said a former National Rally councilor. “Either you become No. 1 or you get killed off.” Jean-Marie Le Pen, for example, dispatched two rivals before being sidelined by his daughter.

 

Undoubtedly ambitious, Bardella is certainly familiar with the party’s history. “It’s in his best interest to wait … but deep inside, I think he’s preparing himself,” said the same councilor.

 

Given his wider appeal and pro-business attitudes, there are some in the party that he could be the one to take the party over the line in 2027, especially if Le Pen is ruled ineligible for office following a pending trial for embezzlement.

 

But there are more who believe he’s more likely to be on the losing end of any battle with the woman who made his political fortunes and who continues to grip the party with an iron fist.

 

“If he blows a fuse, there are five people who’ll [follow him],” said a Le Pen ally. “Even his campaign director wouldn’t follow him, he would never accept anyone who has betrayed Le Pen.”

 

In other words, in a clash with the party’s real heavyweight, Bardella could risk seeing his star come crashing down to Earth.

 

Sarah Paillou and Victor Goury-Laffont contributed reporting.

 

Photos by Guillaume Horcajuelo/EFE via EPA; Bertrand Guay, Loic Venance, Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt and Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images. Additional source images via Freepik. Lettering via Textstudio. Additional illustration by Arnau Busquets Guàrdia/POLITICO.