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‘A paradigm shift’: will Jordan Bardella finally
normalise Le Pen’s far right?
Smooth-talking National Rally president aims to change
the tone- but not the content- of party’s anti-immigration message
Angelique
Chrisafis
Angelique
Chrisafis in Montereau-Fault-Yonne
Wed 1 May
2024 06.00 CEST
Amid the
paté stalls and wine-tastings of a country fair, a young politician hailed as
the new face of the French far right was jostled by crowds shouting for
photographs and handing him tricolour flags to autograph. “Rockstar!” shouted
one 18-year-old.
Jordan
Bardella, 28, who as president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party
(Rassemblement National) has one of the biggest TikTok followings in French
politics, never says no to a selfie with teenage fans, flashing his
well-rehearsed smile. “Unlike Emmanuel Macron, our party never lost touch with
the French people,” he said.
“You’re so
handsome and you never cock up in TV interviews,” said a grandmother at a
champagne stand. “Well, I try my best,” replied Bardella earnestly, while
apologising to the wine-maker for not being able to drink a full glass so early
in the day.
Bardella,
who was elected to the European parliament five years ago when he was 23, is
leading the National Rally’s European election campaign to unprecedented
heights in the polls ahead of the 9 June vote. Ifop polling this month put
Bardella’s far-right party on 31.5%, with Macron’s centrists on 17%. If
Bardella beats Macron’s party by a wide margin it threatens to panic centrists,
right and left, and set the tone in French national politics for the coming
years.
Bardella’s
deliberately humble tone with voters is part of his strategy to deliver the
final phase of Le Pen’s decade-long drive to soften the far-right party’s
image. He does not seek to dilute the party’s hardline anti-immigration
message, which has not changed since the 1970s; instead he wants to make it
respectable and fully mainstream ahead of Le Pen’s fourth attempt at the
presidency in 2027.
For
decades, the party founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was regarded as a
danger to democracy that promoted racist, antisemitic and anti-Muslim views.
Bardella rejects this portrayal. He stands for a new young generation of
softly-spoken lawmakers in navy suits and ties who now make up the biggest
single opposition party in parliament. “We are reasonable people,” he said. “We
stand for reason against excess. I stand for the return to reason.”
Much of
Bardella’s rising personal approval ratings are linked to his personal story.
He grew up on a housing estate in Saint-Denis, at the heart of the low-income,
multi-ethnic Paris suburbs that have been so stigmatised. He describes himself
as a part of a generation that grew up in the “embers” of the 2005 urban riots,
in which young people living in estates across France rose up after the deaths
of two boys who died hiding from police.
The son of
Italians who arrived in the 1960s, Bardella is presented as a “good immigrant”
who embraced French culture and civilisation, which he now warns is under
threat from what he calls Islamist ideology. With a single mother who he says
usually had only €20 left in her purse at the end of the month, Bardella joined
the far-right party at 16 and later quit a geography degree to canvass
full-time.
Tactically,
Marine Le Pen has mentored Bardella as party president, while she retains
overall control of the party. They share the same hardline agenda on
immigration, security and keeping “France for the French”. But unlike Le Pen,
with her bourgeois upbringing and the baggage of her name, Bardella is a blank
canvas for voters to project themselves on to.
Le Pen has
said Bardella would be her prime minister if she became president. Others think
he could run for president himself. In September, Le Pen and 26 other party
members face trial over the alleged misuse of EU funds. Le Pen denies all
wrongdoing. Bardella, who is not facing charges, is seen as a potential
replacement if Le Pen does not run in 2027.
“He
represents youth, speaks well, looks like the ideal son-in-law, is modern –
that is what people want and he’s reached a level of superstardom,” said
Aymeric Durox, a history teacher and National Rally senator for the
Seine-et-Marne, south of Paris, where support has grown.
Le Pen’s
party long ago abandoned its ideas of a Frexit, or a French exit from the
European Union, although it continues to oppose the EU’s green deal and
migration and asylum pact. But in France, Bardella defends the party’s
longstanding ideas: the supposed danger of mass immigration and the promise to
prioritise native French people over non-French people for welfare benefits and
housing. He has warned of a “barbaric” and savage atmosphere in France, saying
time is running out to save the nation.
At the
fair, south of Paris, Bardella said: “I think the biggest threat facing our
nation today is radical Islam, political Islam, which constitutes a fifth
column. It does not want to break away from France and French society but to
conquer it and impose its own prohibitions on all French people. Some people
are resigned to that, I’m not.”
But
Bardella sidesteps the classic populist framework of representing the “France
of the forgotten” versus the rotten elites. He has appealed to business leaders
and entrepreneurs, managing to slightly increase support among higher-earning,
educated voters as well as pensioners, who had previously stayed away.
“I don’t
think ‘the people against the oligarchy’ makes an election,” he said.
Pierre
Jouvet, a Socialist running for the European election alongside the
highest-polling leftwing candidate, Raphaël Glucksmann, said that “beyond the
selfies and the cosmetic level of communication”, Bardella represented a
“dangerous” project for France and Europe. He said even when the National Rally
said it supported Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, the party’s links to
Moscow were not clear.
Jouvet said
the National Rally was dangerous on the issue of migration in Europe, and
Bardella wanted a “Europe of barbed wire fences”. He said the party had “a
dangerous vision of the fragmentation of society in France”, and while it
didn’t present racism openly, “it is always implicit that the enemy is always a
foreigner, a north African or a Muslim, held as responsible for French people’s
difficulties. So they bring a kind of atmosphere of racism to France, which is
foul and which we’re fighting against.”
Cécile
Alduy, a professor at Stanford University and a specialist on Le Pen’s party,
has analysed two years of Bardella’s speeches. She said they were “as if copy
pasted from Marine Le Pen and Jean-Marie Le Pen. It’s still the same triad of
immigration, identity and Islam. The big difference is tone and style. The
message is the same but delivered in a really smooth, poised and calm, tone of
voice.”
Whereas
Marine Le Pen could be mocking and sarcastic, Bardella delivered his put-downs
calmly, Alduy said: “He’s a magazine-ready figure for the far right, everything
clean-cut and neat, white smile … He goes even further in softening the party
image – smoothing things out so that it feels banal, normal and mainstream.”
This is
possible in part because the far-right’s ideas have become more ingrained in
the political debate, with other parties borrowing their rhetoric on
immigration, crime and the threat to civilisation.
Stewart
Chau, the director of polling at Vérian group, said long-term studies showed
French voters were increasingly adhering to the National Rally’s reading of
society’s problems and its proposed solutions. The last Vérian barometer in
December showed that for the first time since 1984 more French people thought
the National Rally was not a danger (45%) than thought it was a danger (41%).
“Never
before have so many French people considered the National Rally as a completely
legitimate party,” Chau said. “From the point of view of public opinion, that
is a paradigm shift.”
Chau said
the re-named party had “detached itself from the whiff of sulphur that
surrounded it when it was the Front National set up by Jean-Marie Le Pen”.
People no longer focused on the racist, antisemitic positions associated with
the party’s founder, he said.
Antoine
Bristielle, the director of opinion at the Fondation Jean Jaurès thinktank,
said Bardella was expected to beat Macron’s centrist candidate, Valérie Hayer,
in the European elections with a clear margin. “This will have a huge influence
on the whole public debate in France until the next presidential elections in
2027 because the main focus will be who and how to stop a scenario where the
National Rally could win the presidential vote,” he said.
“The idea
is they’re not fascists, they’re credible,” said an engineer in his 30s who
voted for the party and met Bardella at the fair.
“I should
have brought a banner saying: ‘I love you,’” said one 15-year-old girl. Her
father, a fairground worker, added: “This man could save France.”
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