Family
first: Le Pen clan tightens its grip as Bardella hits trouble
France’s
far-right leader is surrounding herself with family and longtime loyalists as
her party president faces a damaging new controversy.
Marie-Caroline
Le Pen, Marine Le Pen and Nolwenn Olivier arrive for Jean-Marie Le Pen's
funeral on Jan. 11, 2025. | Sebastien Salom-Gomis/AFP via Getty Images
September
30, 2026 4:00 am CET
By Clea Caulcutt and Marion Solletty
https://www.politico.eu/article/marine-le-pen-jordan-bardella-national-rally-family-2027-election/
PARIS —
In Marine Le Pen’s political world, family has a habit of finding its way back
to the center of power.
That
could now matter more than ever for Jordan Bardella.
The
31-year-old president of the far-right National Rally is battling allegations
that he exchanged antisemitic messages as a young activist — accusations he has
dismissed as “blatant falsehoods.” The controversy comes at an awkward moment
for a party Le Pen has spent years trying to distance from the antisemitism
associated with its past.
Le Pen
has so far backed Bardella, offering her protégé an emphatic public defense.
“The system will do anything — including the most disgusting things — to try to
hinder this momentum,” she said, sitting next to him as they addressed
reporters in the National Assembly Tuesday.
But
Bardella’s difficulties inside the party predate the allegations — and the
latest controversy now threatens to amplify them. His standing inside the
National Rally had already grown precarious, with Le Pen drawing relatives and
longtime loyalists closer as she prepares for next year’s presidential
election.
Le Pen’s
27-year-old niece Nolwenn Olivier, Bardella’s former girlfriend, has been
promoted to communications director. Another niece, Marion Maréchal, who broke
with the party during the last presidential election, is back in favor and
expected to play a frontline role. And Le Pen’s own brother-in-law, Philippe
Olivier, an unofficial chief adviser, is taking part in many top campaign
meetings.
At the
same time, several figures associated with Bardella have been sidelined, passed
over for promotion, or even ejected
from the party. Once touted as a possible replacement for Le Pen, Bardella
was not invited to speak at a recent National Rally parliamentary gathering,
despite being party president and Le Pen’s presumptive
choice for prime minister.
There is
no indication Le Pen is preparing to cast Bardella aside. And yet, she has
shown before that protecting the party can trump even the closest personal
ties. In 2015, amid another controversy over antisemitic remarks, she backed
the expulsion of the party’s founder — her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
That
history leaves Bardella with little room for error as Marine Le Pen prepares
for her fourth attempt at the presidency — and increasingly surrounds herself
with people whose loyalty she has little reason to question.
Florian
Philippot, once Le Pen’s right-hand man before abruptly leaving the party after
the 2017 election, said some elements of Bardella’s treatment felt familiar.
“The
little snubs, not being given a chance to speak,” Philippot said. “They are
very telling.” Le Pen and her inner circle “would bring others back in and put
them in the spotlight to show that you’re no longer the closest one,” he added.
Family
affair
That Le
Pen’s family would play a prominent role in her campaign was evident from the
moment a court cleared
the way for her on July 7 to run for office.
The next
day she headed to La Flèche for her first campaign stop.
The town
southwest of Paris is not just a National Rally stronghold. It is also a family
one. Le Pen was welcomed by cheering crowds alongside her sister
Marie-Caroline, who was running in the local senatorial race, and her
brother-in-law Philippe Olivier.
They were
accompanied, according to local press reports, by their daughter Nolwenn
Olivier — Le Pen’s niece and future communications director for the campaign.
Bardella, meanwhile, trailed Le Pen stony-faced as she worked the crowd and
answered journalists’ questions.
Since
then, Le Pen’s relatives and longtime loyalists have tightened their hold on
her electoral operation.
Maréchal,
who left the party but is now back in the fold, is expected to play a key role
in the campaign, according to two National Rally officials. In an interview earlier this month, the 36-year-old said she
could work on improving relations with the German and Italian governments if Le
Pen were to win the presidency.
Beyond
the family, longtime Le Pen loyalists have also been elevated. Her former chief
of staff Renaud Labaye has been appointed deputy campaign director, while
National Rally lawmaker Sébastien Chenu, another longstanding ally, is now in
charge of local representatives.
“For
Marine Le Pen, it’s either a victory in 2027 or never,” said Jean-Yves Camus, a
far-right specialist with the Jean-Jaurès Foundation. “And if it’s now or
never, she needs to bolster her inner circle and have absolute trust in them.”
Those
close to Le Pen described the tightening of the circle less as a liability than
as a source of political strength.
“Some
families just have politics in their blood,” said a person close to a member of
the Le Pen family, who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to
discuss internal party matters. “Since when are members of the Le Pen family a
handicap for the party?”
This
summer, Philippe Olivier spent several weeks on holiday with Le Pen in the
family bastion of La Trinité-sur-Mer in Brittany, giving him unusual access
ahead of Le Pen’s campaign launch this autumn.
“He’s
Marine Le Pen’s standard-bearer,” said a former National Rally adviser. “He
spends his holidays with Le Pen, he has a degree of intimacy with her that is
rare in politics. He’s loyal, writes her speeches.”
Olivier
bristled at questions about the family’s role in the party, describing them as
“insulting” in an interview with POLITICO.
“Reducing
my presence in the party to my position as Marie-Caroline’s husband, when I’ve
been a member of the political leadership for years — the reproaches are
stupid,” he said.
Killer
instinct
For
veterans of the movement, it’s a familiar pattern.
The
National Rally and its predecessor were run by the Le Pen family for nearly
five decades before Marine Le Pen handed the reins to Bardella in 2021. Long
before that, senior party figures had risen through the ranks only to find
themselves eclipsed or shown the door when their ambitions collided with those
of the family.
In the
late 1990s, the party’s number two, Bruno Mégret, rebelled after being passed
over as the lead candidate for the European Parliament election in favor of the
wife of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, who was then the party
leader.
The feud
split the movement — and the Le Pen family itself. As Marine’s sister,
Marie-Caroline, sided with the rebels, Jean-Marie began pushing Marine to the
forefront of the party.
“Marine
is a killer, which is a strength in politics,” said Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a
senior party figure at the time who joined the breakaway faction. She had
“superior political skills that her father had likely detected.”
The two
sisters later reconciled. Jean-Marie Le Pen would eventually discover firsthand
how ruthless his daughter could be when asserting control. In 2015, after
repeated clashes over his antisemitic remarks — including a description of Nazi
gas chambers as a “detail” of history — the party she led expelled him.
The
pattern resurfaced after the 2017 presidential election, when Philippot, then
Marine Le Pen’s right-hand man and one of the architects of the party’s surge
among working-class voters, abruptly left the party after losing an internal
battle over its direction.
With Le
Pen, said a former senior National Rally official, “you’re either in favor or
out of favor. There’s no middle ground.”
Plan B
For
Bardella, the problem is not simply that Le Pen’s family has moved closer. It
is that his own role has narrowed sharply since July.
For
months, he had been preparing for the possibility of having to replace Le Pen
as the party’s presidential candidate. Once that prospect disappeared, Bardella
was expected to fall back into line behind the woman whose political future he
had been preparing to inherit.
According
to a top National Rally official, Bardella himself acknowledged the difficulty
of that position: He had to prepare seriously enough to become a credible “Plan
B” candidate while showing enough deference to make clear that Le Pen remained
the party’s undisputed standard-bearer.
“His
crime was that he really wanted to be [the presidential candidate] and he was
disappointed,” said the former senior National Rally official. “He wasn’t able
to hide it and morph overnight into the loyal foot soldier.”
Bardella’s
reduced room for maneuver is also visible in the party’s policy direction.
His
allies had pushed the National Rally toward greater fiscal caution, including a
softer position on pensions. Le Pen has instead doubled down on promises to
protect retirement benefits and cut taxes on fuel and electricity, while
putting immigration and purchasing power back at the center of the campaign.
The focus
now is to “mobilize our voters,” Philippe Olivier said. “They risk thinking
that if we are not talking about immigration anymore, we’re dropping it.”
The
latest controversy further complicates Bardella’s position.
In
comments allegedly made when he was 17, shortly after he had joined the
National Rally, Bardella said that “the Jew must dominate other peoples, crush
them, and rob them” and “all banks are held by the Jews,” according to the
French investigative outlet Mediapart.
On
Tuesday, the National Rally launched a counterattack, forcefully denying the
allegations against Bardella. At a joint press conference with Le Pen, Bardella
denounced “an attempt to destabilize their campaign.” Le Pen pledged her
“absolute confidence” in the party president.
Bardella
has also announced that he has filed a defamation lawsuit against
Mediapart.
During
the period when Bardella was expected to be his party’s presidential candidate,
one of his main assets was his distance from the party’s toxic past. Le Pen’s
political rivals
“The far
right will remain the far right,” said
Raphaël Glucksmann, a center-left presidential hopeful. “No communications
agency, no window dressing will change that.” Marine Tondelier, leader of the
Green party, called on Bardella to step down “from all his
responsibilities.”
“I think
this ruins [Le Pen’s] strategy to shed her controversial image,” said Gaspard
Gantzer, a former adviser for ex-president François Hollande.
“It’s
going to make people very uncomfortable,” he said.
Sarah
Paillou contributed reporting.
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