Marine Le
Pen or Jordan Bardella? Identity crisis grips France's far right.
To the
chagrin of Le Pen's old guard, it's Bardella's more liberal, pro-business
vision that may well secure the presidency for the National Rally.
By MARION
SOLLETTY
in Paris
Illustration
by Victoria Cecé for POLITICO
August
18, 2025 4:00 am CET
Will the
real candidate for France’s far right please stand up?
Tension
is brewing at the top of France’s most popular party over whether it will be
Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen who leads the National Rally into the
all-important 2027 presidential election — and what that means for the party’s
vision and identity.
Bardella,
the slick 29-year-old president of the party, has generally been viewed as a
loyal, unthreatening protégé to Le Pen. She is the heavyweight whom the party
base has long seen as most likely to win a race for the Elysée that could
remold Europe’s political landscape.
But
something is now shifting in that leadership dynamic. To Le Pen’s chagrin, she
could well be out of the running to succeed Emmanuel Macron because of a fraud
conviction, just as Bardella takes off in the polls and steers the National
Rally toward a new kind of electorate.
While Le
Pen is a scourge of liberal elites, who has courted the working class, Bardella
is now wooing conservative business leaders who have historically been wary of
Le Pen’s National Rally. While the earthy Le Pen is strong in the
disillusioned, former industrial towns of the northeast, the polished Bardella
is targeting the wealthier south.
The
National Rally’s old guard may not feel entirely at ease with Bardella’s more
economically liberal approach but it understands the electoral arithmetic.
Winning the presidency means winning more than half the vote, and that will
mean poaching voters from the center-right Les Républicains. For that task,
Bardella is the man.
Of
course, for now, Bardella follows Le Pen’s orders — and she coordinates his
forays into new voter bases — but she is also far from blind to his
increasingly rapid ascent.
The
party’s top brass is treading on eggshells as a new reality emerges. Le Pen’s
candidacy is up in the air until the appeal for her conviction, most probably
in the summer of 2026, and in the meantime pollsters are revealing Bardella is
just as credible as a presidential candidate. Officially, the party is
pretending it’s business as usual, but it’s not.
The
unease about which way the party is going — and who will be the front-runner
for the Elysée — is now palpable.
Bardella
bids for business
Bardella’s
appeal to a new kind of voter was in full evidence at the Freedom Summit, a
jamboree in late June intended to galvanize the right ahead of the presidential
election.
The
event, which gathered anti-tax groups, right-wing figureheads and political
activists across the full spectrum of the right, was held under the patronage
of the most powerful godfathers of the French hard right, media mogul Vincent
Bolloré and tech billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin.
Despite
the soporific heat in the Casino de Paris, a grandiose theater in the heart of
the capital, the crowd erupted in excitement when Bardella stepped up to make
his pitch. They cheered loudly as he slammed EU red tape and — perhaps most
significantly — nodded when he hinted at the need for cuts in social spending
to put France’s public finances back on track.
Revealingly,
Bardella is keen to play up parallels with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia
Meloni, who is seen as having successfully mainstreamed the hard right, while
Le Pen is more closely aligned with Meloni’s deputy, Matteo Salvini, an
old-school anti-immigration, nationalist firebrand.
At the
Freedom Summit, he was lavish in his praise for Meloni’s ability to turn the
Italian economy around, while France is rapidly becoming Europe’s economic
renegade over its inability to sort out its deficits.
“I’m
looking at numbers and I’m looking at Mrs. Meloni’s actions,” Bardella told
POLITICO outside the venue. “Italy is the only G7 country with a primary budget
surplus in 2024.”
“Giorgia
Meloni is the living proof that popular will can prevail in the ballot,” he
added.
And that
question of who has the magic recipe for success at the ballot box becomes ever
more sensitive as 2027 nears.
Le Pen
has stood in three presidential elections, edging closer to victory each time,
but now faces two major obstacles.
The first
is simply the two-round system, which allows mainstream parties to gang up in
the run-off and keep her out of power. The second hurdle is an earth-shattering
court decision in March that barred her from running over the embezzlement of
funds. That ruling is not necessarily final, as an appeal decision will be
issued next year.
For the
party, Bardella is a solution to both problems: He has no conviction against
him, and stands a good chance of winning over enough center-right voters to
make it across the 50 percent line in the presidential election. That clearly
rankles with Le Pen, as the party elite realize they may finally gain power
thanks to her leadership, but without her as the presidential candidate.
Several
party heavyweights interviewed for this story were adamant that Le Pen and
Bardella are working together harmoniously toward a common goal — clearing her
name and propelling her to victory in 2027 — but the reality is now more
complex.
Tensions
bubble up
In one of
the latest examples of a fault line, Bardella in mid-June openly called for
Macron to step down. The problem with making such as call is that an early
presidential election could come before Le Pen’s appeal, bumping her out of the
contest. The move raised eyebrows among some of the National Rally’s most
prominent members.
“I
discussed it with Marine who didn’t get it … I think he went a bit fast,” said
one Le Pen loyalist and National Rally heavyweight, who like multiple other
party officials in this story was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Others
shrugged it off, or attributed it to a spur-of-the-moment slipup.
“It is
not a slipup. It is what we have been saying for several months,” said a
far-right lawmaker close to Bardella. “If there is [an early election] we will
be there, even if that’s not our ideal scenario.”
According
to him, Le Pen and Bardella spoke both before and after the interview. “It is
not a comfortable situation, for either of them. There is a balance to be
found,” he added.
Two days
after the call for an early election, a carefully choreographed visit to the
Paris Air Show, their first joint trip in weeks, was widely interpreted as an
attempt by Le Pen to set the record straight.
As she
and Bardella were perusing the fighter jets and missiles at Le Bourget, he
conspicuously followed her lead, silently nodding in agreement as she answered
reporters’ questions and grinning as Le Pen kept referring to him as her “prime
minister” — the post she has long eyed
for him, should she become president.
The
official plan B
In the
weeks following the conviction that made Le Pen ineligible to run, the party
had to quickly adjust its strategy, from initially saying there was no need for
a plan B to saying Bardella was officially the plan B.
The
National Rally now faces an awkward campaign with two figureheads. While nobody
is openly accusing Bardella of trying to stab her in the back, everyone
concedes the situation is prickly.
Bardella has to demonstrate he is ready to take over and lead a
presidential race, should Le Pen’s appeal fail, but not openly campaign just
yet, or risk his mentor’s ire.
Around
both leaders, top party officials and longtime companions alike are in an
agonizing bind. “Of course it’s complicated from a human point of view,” a
member of Le Pen’s inner circle confessed.
The
far-right leader herself admits her future is in question.
“When
you’re in politics, you have to accept that you can’t always control events,”
Le Pen told far-right weekly Valeurs Actuelles. “I’ve accepted the possibility
that I won’t be able to run.”
“Of
course, the situation isn’t ideal. But what else do you suggest?” she went on.
“That I commit suicide before being murdered?”
Le Pen,
who denies any wrongdoing, has cast the trial as politically motivated and the
verdict as a death penalty.
But as
she awaits the firing squad, she is undergoing a drip-drip of water torture, as
she watches her heir replace her in polls and voters’ minds alike.
In early
May, her most faithful supporters were outraged to discover that a wide-ranging
survey about to be published by polling firm Ifop polled solely Bardella as the
National Rally candidate for 2027. Le Pen was included only after two of her
top lieutenants intervened.
Although
polling this early before an election has to be taken with a pinch of salt, it
has escaped no one’s notice in the party that Bardella’s numbers are just as
good as Le Pen’s when they’re both polled.
Perhaps
even more worryingly for Le Pen, “there are clearly some doubts among her
current and potential voters about her being on the starting line in 2027,”
said Frédéric Dabi, director general at Ifop.
Show of
force
Faced
with these buffeting headwinds, Le Pen has been forced to play catch-up.
On June
9, her party held a massive rally with European allies in
Mormant-sur-Vernisson, a rural commune 100 kilometers south of Paris, where the
National Rally won over 60 percent of the vote in the 2024 European election.
The big
idea was to show that Le Pen was still the sort of big hitter who would stand
shoulder to shoulder with the big names of the European right.
Sure
enough, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Salvini and Czech
ex-Prime Minister Andrej Babiš appeared on stage to sing the praises of Le Pen.
But
despite that endorsement, “Jordan” — as they call him — is just as popular with
the party’s rank and file.
“I like
them both, Marine Le Pen for her experience, Jordan Bardella for his charisma,”
said Nicolas Rocard, 36, who is eyeing a spot to run for the party in the city
of Niort in next year’s local elections. “Who is the [presidential] candidate?
I don’t really mind.”
A stone’s
throw away, under the big white tents protecting attendees from the blazing
sun, party members also seemed fine with a swap. “Sincerely, I would prefer it
to be Marine. Failing that it will be Jordan,” said Christelle Maho, 58, a
local councillor for the party in Lanester, Brittany.
“I don’t
want my country to be invaded by people who have nothing to do here,” said
Régine Gesnouin, 62, a restaurant owner in Agen, who made the seven-hour drive
with her husband in their motorhome to be there. “We are working 70-80 hours a
week, they are not working, only having kids.”
Gesnouin
said she used to vote for the center right under former President Nicolas
Sarkozy but now has switched to the National Rally.
Serenading
the center right
In fact,
economic issues will likely prove decisive for the party in the next
presidential race, where it will need to broaden its base and attract the
voters it still lacks to pass the 50 percent bar in the runoff, presumably by
luring them away from the traditionally liberal, pro-business center right.
For that
electorate, Bardella is more palatable than Le Pen, who still bears the stigma
of her name and past proposals that durably sunk her economic credibility,
including a pledge to exit the eurozone — a step the party no longer advocates.
Bardella’s
overtures to the business elite are a break from the way Le Pen has
campaigned.
She
bagged formidable gains by focusing on the cost of living and courting voters
in disaffected industrial heartlands with a protectionist agenda. Her top
lieutenants and some of the party’s most prominent lawmakers in the National
Assembly were elected in the northeast of the country, her political fiefdom,
where plant closures and a grim economic outlook fueled working class
discontent.
The wave
of lawmakers elected under Le Pen’s leadership loathes the word “liberal” (in
the economic sense) and insists it doesn’t reflect the party’s line.
They have
reasons to be worried about Bardella’s direction of travel.
“The ones
close to Le Pen are freaking out,” said a prominent centrist politician, whose
constituency is in the northeast. “They think they have invested all this time
and effort only to have it snatched away from them … They’re the ones who went
out and got the left-wing vote, voters who expect protection against job cuts,
an increase in the minimum wage and so on.”
Bardella,
who led his party’s list in the European election and is now eyeing electoral
wins in the south, the former hunting ground of Le Pen’s father and home to
wealthier, more liberal-minded voters, has no reservations about embracing a
more liberal platform.
Nor do
his troops in the European Parliament, although they reject the idea that their
boss is freewheeling by going after the new type of voter.
“Today
she is much more liberal than [center-right party] Les Républicains,” said
Aleksandar Nikolic, a member of the European Parliament and spokesperson for
the party.
Asked
whether he defined himself as a liberal at the Freedom Summit in June, Bardella
ducked the question.
“I don’t
think this label is enough to explain the economic issues and stakes,” he said.
“Emmanuel Macron presented himself as a pro-business president. Today, we have
some of the highest production taxes in Europe.”
Last
year, Bardella vocally opposed raising taxes on capital gains, going against
the party’s official position and the bulk of his party’s members of
parliament. He has also been touring corporate associations to defend the
party’s economic platform and hit back against the idea that the National Rally
would be bad for business.
Earlier
this month, Bardella scored a meeting he’d long been after — a session with
former center-right President Sarkozy, whom he sent a signed copy of his book.
The
meeting was publicized by both politicians’ staff and was clearly intended as
signal to undecided right-of-center voters. It was a meeting that Sarkozy would
never have granted to Le Pen — and one she would never have asked for.
“Courting
Sarkozy’s circles is personally not my cup of tea,” said a National Rally
parliamentarian who leans more toward Le Pen.
But he
conceded the National Rally could not afford to be too squeamish when it came
to the electoral calculus to win the presidency. “When one wants to go from 35
to 51 percent, one has to speak to multiple electorates, including former
Sarkozy fans,” he said.
Still,
although Le Pen loyalists credit Bardella with broadening the party’s appeal,
they also fear that overtures to traditional center-right voters might
ultimately benefit right-wing rivals inside and outside the party, including
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, from Les Républicains, an immigration
hard-liner and staunch conservative who is hunting on the same grounds.
As the
National Rally MP quoted above put it: “What I’m wary about with the
liberal-conservative kind is that they … might ultimately drop us for someone
else.”
Sarah
Paillou contributed to this report.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário