Jordan Bardella’s moment has arrived

It is time to take seriously the possibility that the next president of France will be Jordan Bardella. His star power was persuasively demonstrated at Thursday’s May Day rally of the Rassemblement National (RN) in Narbonne, the heartland of the French right.

It was part political rally, part disco. The demographic was startling. The party stalwarts, aging boomers who have been voting for Le Pens for forty years, were heavily outnumbered by young people, dancing in front of the stage, waving tricolours.

The French political establishment has long portrayed the RN as extremist, but Bardella threatens that characterisation

Marine Le Pen, 56, spoke first and was rapturously applauded by her party faithful. But her delivery was flat. She seemed exhausted. She is resilient, having run for president three times already, but she has lost every time. While she insists that she is still in the game, she may have hit the buffers.

Jordan Bardella, the 29-year-old president of the RN, followed. His speech was rousing, his words lyrical, his rhetoric tough, promising a hard line on crime, savaging the ecologists and praising entrepreneurs. He vowed to deport foreign criminals and specifically to confront Algeria, which has humiliated France by refusing to accept Algerian criminals under deportation orders. The crowd’s reaction was hysterically enthusiastic.

Bardella grew up in a modest neighborhood in Drancy, a suburb of Paris, raised by his mother, a childcare assistant. He joined the National Front (later RN) at 16, drawn to Marine Le Pen, and quickly rose through the ranks: departmental secretary for Seine-Saint-Denis at 19, a regional councillor in the Île-de-France in 2015, and party spokesperson in 2017. He became a Member of the European Parliament in 2019 at age 23, leading the RN in the European elections. He was elected president of the party in 2022 with 84.8 per cent of the vote, becoming the first party leader outside the Le Pen family. In 2024, he again led the RN in the European elections, achieving a historic 31.4 per cent of the vote.

While Le Pen is beloved by the party’s mature base, Bardella is well-connected to younger voters through social media, with over two million followers on TikTok. His polished image – youthful, clean-shaven, and media-savvy – further enhances his appeal, especially among the female voters the party has had difficulty reaching. An Ipsos poll following the 2024 European elections revealed that RN’s support among women rose from 20 per cent in 2019 to 30 per cent in 2024, a 10-point increase. The same poll noted that 32 per cent of women voted for RN in 2024, slightly more than men at 31 per cent. This shift narrows the historical gender gap in right-wing voting.

Bardella is careful not to openly challenge Le Pen, but he doesn’t have to. Last month, she was declared ineligible to run for president in 2027 after being convicted in March of fraudulent diversion of European Parliament funds to pay the salaries of her party’s staff. While Le Pen is appealing the conviction, Bardella has confirmed his candidacy for the 2027 presidential election if her ineligibility stands.

The French political establishment has long portrayed the RN as extremist, but Bardella threatens that characterisation. Unlike Marine Le Pen, he cannot be tied to the party’s far-right founder Jean-Marie Le Pen by family lineage. And while Marine Le Pen has promoted a leftist economic policy alongside a rightist policy on immigration, Bardella has been shifting the party towards a more friendly attitude to business. Notwithstanding his extreme youth – he would be 31 at the time of the election in April 2027 – if Bardella can continue to demonstrate the political talent on show in Narbonne on Thursday, he could be hard to beat.