From TikTok to premieres. Macron’s new rival

In France, the main winner of the European Parliament elections was the leader of the far right, Jordan Bardella, a 28-year-old youth idol with the looks of a movie star.

In France, in the European Parliament elections, the National Rally party inflicted a crushing defeat on Emmanuel Macron’s party, forcing the president to dissolve parliament and announce early elections. Already in July, Jordan Bardella, the new leader of the far right, could become prime minister.

Want to look poor

Jordan Bardella was born on September 13, 1995 in Saint-Denis, a disadvantaged suburb of Paris inhabited mainly by immigrants of Arab and African origin. His mother Louise immigrated to France from Italy in the 1960s. His father Olivier also has part immigrant (Algerian) roots.

Bardella grew up in social housing – in dull municipal high-rises built in Saint-Denis. His parents separated when Jordan was two years old. He was raised by his mother, who worked as a kindergarten assistant and lived paycheck to paycheck.

True, his childhood was not full of difficulties, as he and his PR people try to imagine.

His father, after the divorce, moved from Saint-Denis to a more prosperous area and became a successful seller of vending machines. He picked up his son twice a week, took him on vacations abroad and paid for his education at the private Catholic Lycée Saint-Jean-Baptiste de la Salle.

Bardella remembers school, perhaps because studying at a prestigious lyceum didn’t quite fit his image of coming from a rough neighborhood. But we should not forget this part of his life, because of the role that a private school can play in shaping his social circle, world view and, what is very important for a politician, oratorical skills.

Bardella graduated with honors from the Lyceum and entered the Sorbonne to study geography, where, however, he did not stay long – in his third year he dropped out of school, deciding to devote himself entirely to the activities in the National Front.

Rebranding on the far right

Traditionally, the National Front is considered in France as an anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, racist and dangerous party for democracy.

Bardella, charismatic, impeccably dressed and neatly combed (he has been compared to Ken, the boyfriend of the Barbie doll), with a soft voice and impeccable manners, became the perfect embodiment of the party’s new image and a complete which is a hit among young people. audiences. That is, exactly the person Marine Le Pen needed to deliver her main message to the people: we are not racists, but a “normal opposition party” that defends the interests of ordinary French citizens.

At the age of 19, Jordan Bardella became secretary of the National Front branch in Saint-Denis, and in 2015 he was elected to the Ile-de-France regional council. And in the 2017 presidential elections, the 22-year-old Bardella joined Marine Le Pen’s election team.

Youth Voices

Bardella brought millions of votes from young voters, dissatisfied with high prices, unemployment, and the inability to buy housing and plan for the future, to the party, traditionally supported by the older generation.

He communicates with them in their language and on their platforms – Bardella has become a TikTok star, where he has 1.6 million followers. In the comments on his posts there are declarations of love, which are more suitable for fans of pop music and movie stars.

A video of Bardella and Marine Le Pen walking through a field in snow-white shirts ahead of the European elections, and Le Pen asking to vote for Jordan Bardell to give France a landslide victory, got more than 6 million view on his account within two days.

His popularity in France is undeniable: Bardella is the only politician on Le Journal du Dimanche’s list of the 50 most famous Frenchmen. According to an Ipsos poll, around a third of young people aged 18 to 24 will vote for him in the European elections.

Future plans

After losing the 2017 presidential election to Macron, Marine Le Pen changed the name of the National Front to the National Rally. In 2018, Jordan Bardella led its youth department.

And in 2019, his first big victory came – in the elections to the European Parliament, Le Pen’s party took first place, and the 23-year-old Bardella became a representative of Europe.

Shortly after the European elections, he joined the Party’s Executive Bureau and became its second chairman. And in 2022, Marine Le Pen officially handed over the leadership to him – 27-year-old Jordan Bardella became her successor and president of the National Rally.

However, Marine Le Pen has not retired yet – all major decisions in the party are made by her, but she wants to focus on the main prize – the 2027 presidential elections.

The press called him Le Pen’s perfect son-in-law, and he almost became one in the literal sense – Bardella was in a romantic relationship with Marine Le Pen’s nephew Nolwen Olivier, they broke up shortly before the European elections.

Critics have accused him of a lack of erudition, a lack of personal opinion on major issues, a lack of knowledge in the field of global economics and politics, and a general lack of substance behind his style.

Pascal Humo, the former head of communications at the National Rally, who taught Bardell how to deal with the media, described him as someone who “repeated Le Pen’s formulas over and over again.”

“He is a dummy, a very narrow person. He carried himself well, but he understood very little about what was going on in France or the world,” Humo said.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Marine Le Pen was often criticized for sympathizing with Vladimir Putin, but after February 2022 she came out with a strong condemnation of the Russian invasion. It’s hard to blame Bardell for his pro-Russian views – he condemned the war in Ukraine, even though the National Association abstained from voting in the European Parliament when discussing military aid to Kyiv.

By dissolving parliament and calling early elections, Macron is betting that French voters, who have seen the true face of the National Rally behind the glossy facade and heard his radical anti-immigrant rhetoric , will fear the prospect of power in the hands of the far right and will not vote for them in the election.

But Macron may have miscalculated. A recent Vérian poll found that for the first time since 1984, more French people think the National Rally is not a risk (45%) than think it is a risk (41%).

According to another recent poll, the National Rally will win the early elections and receive between 235 and 265 seats in the National Assembly (the party currently has 88 seats). In this case, Jordan Bardella will become the Prime Minister of France.