Could Jordan Bardella be France’s next PM?

In Britain, France’s National Front is synonymous with the Le Pen family. Jean-Marie founded the right-wing party in 1972 and his daughter Marine replaced him as its leader in 2011. In France, however, the National Rally – as it was rebranded in 2018 – is increasingly the party of Jordan Bardella. The 28-year-old was elected its president in November 2022. The party members had a straight choice: Bardella, a working-class youngster from northern Paris, or the veteran Louis Aliot, the 53-year-old mayor of Perpignan who had joined the party before Bardella was born and who was for many years in a relationship with Marine Le Pen.

Aliot ran an aggressively personal election campaign. A vote for Bardella, he wrote in a newspaper column, would take the party back to the bad old days of the last century ‘and the excesses practised by the National Front’. It was an allusion to a television interview that Bardella gave in 2021; he explained that he didn’t like the term ‘Great Replacement’ – the controversial phrase coined by the novelist Renaud Camus referring to the replacement of white Europeans by non-white immigrants – but nonetheless ‘it points to a reality that’s correct’.

Aliot said this proved his rival was not only too far-right, but he was also raw and inexperienced. Aliot’s campaign backfired and he won just 15 per cent of the vote.

Bardella became president of a party that five months earlier had won 89 seats in the National Assembly. Its presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, had reached the second-round run-off against Emmanuel Macron for the second time, polling more than 13 million votes. What had for many years been a fringe party, and a political pariah, was now mainstream.

Electing Bardella as party president was a gamble.