The court ruling barring Marine Le Pen from running for president has recast a spotlight on her right-hand man, Jordan Bardella, as debate swirls over who may end up representing the far right in France’s 2027 presidential race.
While Le Pen’s lawyer has said she will appeal Monday’s court ruling, the process could drag on for months or years, leaving the ban firmly in place as the country heads towards presidential elections. Polls had long suggested that Le Pen, who helms the far-right the National Rally (RN) party, was among the leading contenders to succeed the country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, after his second and final term ends in 2027.
If Le Pen cannot run, most have pointed to Bardella, her 29-year-old protege who succeeded her at the helm of the party in 2021, as the most probable presidential candidate. At times cast as too young and inexperienced, Bardella has, however, seemingly had the backing of his boss. “Of course he has the capacity to become president of the republic,” Le Pen said in a documentary broadcast by BFMTV late on Sunday.
Such a move would nonetheless mark a dramatic new era for France and – far-right politics aside – may seem unthinkable for many voters. When Macron was elected president in 2017, he was 39 years old, which made him the youngest president in the history of the Fifth Republic. Before his election, the average age at which a French president was elected was 58.5 years.
First elected to the European parliament at the age of 23, Bardella became the new face of the French far right last year after he led the RN’s European election campaign to unprecedented heights.
He then went on to lead the RN during France’s snap parliamentary elections, yielding a third-place finish despite polls that suggested the party would come first. (RN garnered most votes in the first round but was relegated by an alliance on the left voting tactically in the second round.) “We always make mistakes, I made mistakes, and I take my share of responsibility for the results,” Bardella told French television soon after the results came in.
The son of Italians who arrived in France in the 1960s, Bardella joined the far-right party at the age of 16. He embodied a striking contrast to Le Pen. Growing up on a housing estate in Saint-Denis, a working-class suburb, he was raised by a single mother who he said often had just €20 left in her purse at the end of the month.
Smooth-talking and clad in navy suits, Bardella soon proved himself adept at sticking closely to the party’s hardline stance, leveraging his massive following on French TikTok to attempt to normalise the RN’s vehemence against immigrants, and Muslims in particular. Earlier this month, he became the first RN party leader to visit Israel, speaking at a conference on the fight against antisemitism.
Last year, after two years spent analysing Bardella’s speeches, one academic described them as being “copy-pasted” from Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a founder of the party launched in the 1970s as the National Front and who was known for making antisemitic, racist remarks.
“It’s still the same triad of immigration, identity and Islam. The big difference is tone and style,” Cécile Alduy, a professor at Stanford University, said. “The message is the same but delivered in a really smooth, poised and calm tone of voice.”
On Monday, aside from the expected announcement that the ruling would be appealed, there was little discussion of what might lie ahead for the RN if Le Pen is unable to run in 2027.
Bardella, for his part, limited his comments to lashing out at the court over its decision. “Today it is not only Marine Le Pen who was unjustly condemned: it was French democracy that was killed,” he wrote on social media.
French media, however, were swift to highlight comments he had made late last year. In what was seen by many at the time as a swipe at Le Pen – and which led one leftwing politician to call him “Brutus” after the Roman politician who assassinated his ex-ally Julius Caesar – Bardella told BFMTV that “not having a criminal record is, for me, rule number one when you want to be an MP”.
