France's far-right Rassemblement National (RN) elected Jordan Bardella as its new president on Saturday, overwhelmingly backing the 27-year-old European Parliament member to succeed Marine Le Pen in the post.
Jordan Bardella, a self-confident 27-year-old, saw his status as rising star of the far right confirmed on Saturday, after party members elected him to succeed veteran leader Marine Le Pen as head of the National Rally.
The Paris-born politician was the odds-on favourite to take over the party after Le Pen decided to step back from the role after 11 years at the helm. Formerly known as the National Front, the party had been run by Le Pen's father Jean-Marie for 40 years before that. Bardella is now the first party chief outside the family dynasty in a half-century.
"The fact the party president will not have the name Le Pen is the sign of openness and confidence that Marine has in the new generation," Bardella told AFP during a recent trip to eastern France. Not that the ultra-loyal protege, who was elected to the European parliament in 2019, is planning to try to overshadow her.
"I am a continuity candidate, with the aim of building on the incredible legacy that Marine is handing over," he added.
He expects and wants Le Pen to take a fourth run at the presidency in 2027 after her record 41.5 percent in April's election run-off against President Emmanuel Macron. She then fronted the party's parliamentary election campaign in June, which saw the RN capture 89 seats, a 10-fold rise, making it the biggest opposition party in the lower-house National Assembly.
'Drug dealers'
His only opponent was Louis Aliot, the mayor of the southwestern city of Perpignan, who has been unable to match Bardella's public profile despite being a party member for more than 30 years. Le Pen's 32-year-old niece Marion Marechal, long seen as the eventual family successor, is out of the picture, having left the party before the presidential vote to back rival far-right candidate Eric Zemmour.
Bardella had been acting president since September 2021 when Le Pen stepped back during her presidential campaign. "He's got everything right and is respected by everyone," far-right member of parliament Laurent Jacobelli told AFP at a mid-October campaign stop at Hayange in the Moselle region. "And he knows how to make different people work together, so why would we change anything?"
At the event, Bardella spoke confidently on stage, without notes, for 40 minutes, sharing details about his childhood on the eighth floor of a drab tower block in the crime-ridden Seine-Saint-Denis area northeast of Paris. He lived with his mother, an Italian immigrant and single mother.
"Every day from my window and when I entered the building I would see that there were drug dealers checking if you were from the police," he said. There was also an Islamic school across the road, he said. "I used to see groups of girls aged five, six or seven leaving with veils over their heads," he added.
Personal harassment and riots in 2005, led by mostly black and north African youths angry about police violence, pushed him to join Le Pen's party aged just 16. "I got involved in politics very early because I didn't want the whole of France to resemble what I had experienced," he told the crowd.
'Jordan, President!'
Bardella likes to emphasise that he is from a new generation of nationalists with little in common with the racist, anti-Semitic thuggery associated with Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front. Marine Le Pen has gone to great lengths to try to distance herself from this toxic legacy, though critics say racism remains rife at the grassroots level and accuse Le Pen of simply spinning old ideas with new language.
Bardella is the image of the clean-cut and controlled modern party that she now promotes: conspicuously neat, always dressed in immaculate shirts, polished shoes, with hair cut short. "Without Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front wouldn't exist, but without Marine it wouldn't still be here," Bardella told AFP. "She transformed it from having a protest culture to having a culture of government."
'Step aside'
Opponents from within the party, including Aliot, have expressed discomfort with an alleged readiness to embrace ideas espoused by Le Pen's far-right rival the pundit Eric Zemmour. Last year, Bardella came close to embracing Zemmour's mantra of the "Great Replacement", a conspiracy theory that suggests white Europeans are being deliberately replaced by immigrants.
He also hastily backtracked from a plan to attend a demonstration organised by Zemmour's party after the killing of a 12-year-old by an Algerian woman facing expulsion shocked France. There are also questions over what value the presidency of the RN has for Bardella, given Le Pen formally leads its cohort in parliament and is widely expected to be its presidential candidate in 2027. But many expect the party position to be a stepping stone.
"At some point Marine will step aside and he's got every chance," said Alice Orsudci, a 52-year-old business owner watching his campaign tour. "I don't know if we're allowed to say it, and I don't want to flatter him, but I sincerely believe Jordan will be president one day," said member of parliament Jacobelli.
(AP)
