Jordan Bardella\u2019s rise to the peak of French politics has been so swift he is still asked about his teenage years spent playing \u201cCall of Duty.\u201d Next week, at the age of just 28, he could become France\u2019s prime minister \u2013 and Europe\u2019s youngest for more than 200 years. <\/p>\n
He\u2019s the fresh face of an old party that has striven to make itself new. Handpicked as leader by National Rally (RN) doyenne Marine Le Pen in an effort to purge the far-right party of its racist and antisemitic roots, Bardella has taken it closer to the gates of power than ever before. On Sunday, the RN smashed President Emmanuel Macron\u2019s centrist alliance in the first round of a snap parliamentary election. <\/p>\n
Whether the RN forms a government and Bardella becomes prime minister after the July 7 runoff is not clear. Despite the surge in support for the RN, France\u2019s left and centrist parties have called on their supporters to vote tactically to deny the far right an absolute majority in the 577-seat National Assembly. This week, more than 200 parliamentary candidates from Macron\u2019s alliance and the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) stepped down in a bid to avoid splitting the vote in the second round. <\/p>\n
But as Paris wraps a week of political bargaining, one thing is clear: France \u2013 and the rest of Europe \u2013 must reckon with the prospect of a far-right French government, headed by a popular but untested leader. So, who is Bardella, and what might his party do in power? <\/p>\n
The only child of Italian immigrants, Bardella was brought up in Seine-Saint-Denis, a working-class suburb of Paris. He joined the RN at 16, and later began a geography degree at the prestigious Sorbonne university, before dropping out to climb the party ranks. <\/p>\n
He did so briskly. After becoming party spokesperson, he became the RN\u2019s lead candidate for the 2019 European Parliament election at the age of just 23. In 2022, after Le Pen narrowly lost the presidential election to Macron, he succeeded her as party leader, leapfrogging the party\u2019s long standing vice-president and Le Pen\u2019s former partner, Louis Aliot. <\/p>\n
Freed from the day-to-day management of the party, but almost certain to run again for the presidency in 2027, Le Pen has been able to freshen the RN\u2019s image and untether it from its reputation. Le Pen began her yearslong effort to detoxify the RN by ousting her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen \u2013 a convicted Holocaust denier \u2013 from the party he founded, and later changing its name. <\/p>\n
The appointment and subsequent rise of Bardella may represent the completion of her mission to bring the party into the modern age. For many older voters, the prospect of a far-right government \u2013 reminiscent of the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II \u2013 remains terrifying. But among young people, not weighed down by this historical baggage, the party has proved hugely popular. <\/p>\n
While the RN\u2019s messaging has remained similar, the messenger has changed entirely. Suave, composed, unflappable, a child of the screen generation, Bardella has built up a huge TikTok following, where young voters can watch him tasting wine and doing shots. Even a video of him eating a bon-bon has been viewed 7.5 million times. <\/p>\n
In just two years, Bardella has helped to give the RN an acceptable \u2013 and potentially electable \u2013 face. Whereas Macron\u2019s Ensemble alliance has sought to distance itself from the president\u2019s image, the RN\u2019s election manifesto is filled with splashy portraits of the prime minister-in-waiting. <\/p>\n
But campaigning and governing require different skills. If he becomes prime minister, Bardella will face the problem common to parties that make the leap from protest vote to credible governing force: How, after making extravagant promises as they rail against the mainstream, to avoid disappointing people once in office? <\/p>\n
Despite its freshened image, its decades-old philosophy remains the same: Immigrants threaten France\u2019s social fabric. The RN is committed to abolishing the birthright to citizenship for children of foreigners born on French soil, and to discriminate in favor of French citizens in welfare and public employment. <\/p>\n
But on other things in its 21-page manifesto, the RN is more vague. Detailing how it intends to \u201cpreserve French civilization,\u201d it says it will enact \u201cspecific legislation targeting Islamist ideologies,\u201d without elaborating, and that it will \u201cexperiment with the creation of a voluntary national heritage service.\u201d <\/p>\n
But already, the RN has begun to temper some of its more extreme nativist positions. After initially advocating to ban dual-citizenship, Bardella softened this stance, but maintained that \u201cthe most strategic positions\u201d within government will be reserved for French citizens. <\/p>\n
\u201cCan you imagine Franco-Russians working at the Ministry of the Armed Forces today?\u201d he said ahead of the first round. <\/p>\n
But the party has not yet provided a definition of \u201cstrategic positions.\u201d Could, for instance, the Spanish-born Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo remain in post, or would she have to renounce her Spanish citizenship? <\/p>\n
Mocking the vagueness of the RN\u2019s pledges, Jean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon \u2013 the far-left leader of the France Unbowed party, which belongs to the New Popular Front coalition \u2013 has asked: \u201cWhat does Mr. Bardella want? We don\u2019t know. He says nothing. He\u2019s a good-looking guy, but what\u2019s his program? Throwing immigrants into the sea.\u201d <\/p>\n
Critics have said Bardella\u2019s chronic absence from key votes while he was a member of the European Parliament, and his lack of grasp of policy details, make him unfit to govern. In a recent debate with Gabriel Attal, the outgoing French prime minister and Macron\u2019s protege, Bardella confessed, with a smirk, to not having read the text of a bill he had voted against. <\/p>\n
On the economy, the RN has pledged to slash value-added tax on electricity, fuel and other energy products from 20% to 5.5% and suspend it entirely for scores of basic necessities. <\/p>\n
While this may be appealing to voters, it has alarmed both Brussels and the financial markets. France is running one of the highest deficits in the eurozone and now risks falling foul of the European Commission\u2019s new fiscal rules, which had been suspended to help countries recover from the Covid-19 pandemic and energy crisis. French government spending could soon be brutally constrained by Brussels, despite the lavish promises of the RN. <\/p>\n
If the RN falls short of the 289 seats required for an absolute majority, Bardella might choose not to govern. In bullish speeches before the first-round vote, he ruled out leading a minority government, which would require the support of allied parties to pass laws. While France might escape a far-right government for now, it faces the growing prospect of Le Pen becoming president in 2027, and then calling parliamentary elections to see Bardella installed as prime minister. <\/p>\n
Since 2022, formerly fringe nativist parties hoping to govern have found a model to follow. After the technocratic government led by Mario Draghi collapsed in Italy, triggering a snap election, Giorgia Meloni became Italian prime minister, becoming the country\u2019s most far-right leader since Benito Mussolini. <\/p>\n
Before she took office, Rome\u2019s allies thought a hard-right Italian government could compromise Western unity on support for Ukraine, pointing to Matteo Salvini, Meloni\u2019s deputy prime minister and a longtime admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin who used to don T-shirts emblazoned with his image. <\/p>\n
But Meloni\u2019s premiership has proven more moderate than many feared at the outset. While she has pursued hard-right policies domestically \u2013 seeking to limit abortion, surrogacy and even removing lesbian mothers\u2019 names from their children\u2019s birth certificates \u2013 she has largely toed a mainstream line on foreign policy issues. <\/p>\n
Might the RN adopt this bifurcated strategy? <\/p>\n
The RN is notoriously euroskeptic, but talk of a \u201cFrexit\u201d has cooled – perhaps because Britain\u2019s departure from the European Union proved an act of serious economic self-harm, and perhaps because hard-right leaders \u2013 like Hungary\u2019s Viktor Orban \u2013 have shown it is easier to weaken the bloc from the inside than from without. <\/p>\n
With that aim, the RN has promised to cut funding to the EU by up to 3 billion euros ($3.2 billion), partly to fund tax cuts at home. But, with EU budgets agreed on a seven-year basis and the current one running until 2027, the RN cannot legally renege on France\u2019s spending commitments. <\/p>\n
Bardella has also ruled out sending French troops to Ukraine \u2013 an idea floated by Macron \u2013 and said he would not allow Kyiv to use French military equipment to strike targets inside Russia. <\/p>\n
But a Bardella premiership could tip France into a constitutional crisis. While the National Assembly is responsible for passing domestic laws and the prime minister controls the budget, the president determines the country\u2019s foreign, Europe and defense policy. When the prime minister and president belong to different parties \u2013 in a rare arrangement known as \u201ccohabitation\u201d \u2013 things can grind to a halt. <\/p>\n
With Macron set to see out his term, which finishes in 2027, the line between domestic and foreign issues may become blurred. If Macron pursues a foreign policy that requires parliament to pass large spending bills, it is not clear whose preferences would prevail: his or Bardella\u2019s. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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