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Jordan Bardella, 28, who as president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party (Rassemblement National) has one of the biggest TikTok followings in French politics, never says no to a selfie with teenage fans, flashing his well-rehearsed smile. “Unlike Emmanuel Macron, our party never lost touch with the French people,” he said.
“You’re so handsome and you never cock up in TV interviews,” said a grandmother at a champagne stand. “Well, I try my best,” replied Bardella earnestly, while apologising to the wine-maker for not being able to drink a full glass so early in the day.
Bardella, who was elected to the European parliament five years ago when he was 23, is leading the National Rally’s European election campaign to unprecedented heights in the polls ahead of the 9 June vote. Ifop polling this month put Bardella’s far-right party on 31.5%, with Macron’s centrists on 17%. If Bardella beats Macron’s party by a wide margin it threatens to panic centrists, right and left, and set the tone in French national politics for the coming years.
Bardella’s deliberately humble tone with voters is part of his strategy to deliver the final phase of Le Pen’s decade-long drive to soften the far-right party’s image. He does not seek to dilute the party’s hardline anti-immigration message, which has not changed since the 1970s; instead he wants to make it respectable and fully mainstream ahead of Le Pen’s fourth attempt at the presidency in 2027.
For decades, the party founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was regarded as a danger to democracy that promoted racist, antisemitic and anti-Muslim views. Bardella rejects this portrayal. He stands for a new young generation of softly spoken lawmakers in navy suits and ties who now make up the biggest single opposition party in parliament. “We are reasonable people,” he said. “We stand for reason against excess. I stand for the return to reason.”
Much of Bardella’s rising personal approval ratings are linked to his personal story. He grew up on a housing estate in Saint-Denis, at the heart of the low-income, multi-ethnic Paris suburbs that have been so stigmatised. He describes himself as a part of a generation that grew up in the “embers” of the 2005 urban riots, in which young people living in estates across France rose up after the deaths of two boys who died hiding from police.
The son of Italians who arrived in the 1960s, Bardella is presented as a “good immigrant” who embraced French culture and civilisation, which he now warns is under threat from what he calls Islamist ideology. With a single mother who he says usually had only €20 left in her purse at the end of the month, Bardella joined the far-right party at 16 and later quit a geography degree to canvass full-time.
Tactically, Marine Le Pen has mentored Bardella as party president, while she retains overall control of the party. They share the same hardline agenda on immigration, security and keeping “France for the French”. But unlike Le Pen, with her bourgeois upbringing and the baggage of her name, Bardella is a blank canvas for voters to project themselves on to.
Le Pen has said Bardella would be her prime minister if she became president. Others think he could run for president himself. In September, Le Pen and 26 other party members face trial over the alleged misuse of EU funds. Le Pen denies all wrongdoing. Bardella, who is not facing charges, is seen as a potential replacement if Le Pen does not run in 2027.
“He represents youth, speaks well, looks like the ideal son-in-law, is modern – that is what people want and he’s reached a level of superstardom,” said Aymeric Durox, a history teacher and National Rally senator for the Seine-et-Marne, south of Paris, where support has grown.
Le Pen’s party long ago abandoned its ideas of a Frexit, or a French exit from the European Union, although it continues to oppose the EU’s green deal and migration and asylum pact. But in France, Bardella defends the party’s longstanding ideas: the supposed danger of mass immigration and the promise to prioritise native French people over non-French people for welfare benefits and housing. He has warned of a “barbaric” and savage atmosphere in France, saying time is running out to save the nation.
At the fair, south of Paris, Bardella said: “I think the biggest threat facing our nation today is radical Islam, political Islam, which constitutes a fifth column. It does not want to break away from France and French society but to conquer it and impose its own prohibitions on all French people. Some people are resigned to that, I’m not.”
But Bardella sidesteps the classic populist framework of representing the “France of the forgotten” versus the rotten elites. He has appealed to business leaders and entrepreneurs, managing to slightly increase support among higher-earning, educated voters as well as pensioners, who had previously stayed away.
“I don’t think ‘the people against the oligarchy’ makes an election,” he said.
Pierre Jouvet, a Socialist running for the European election alongside the highest-polling leftwing candidate, Raphaël Glucksmann, said that “beyond the selfies and the cosmetic level of communication”, Bardella represented a “dangerous” project for France and Europe. He said even when the National Rally said it supported Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, the party’s links to Moscow were not clear.
Jouvet said the National Rally was dangerous on the issue of migration in Europe, and Bardella wanted a “Europe of barbed wire fences”. He said the party had “a dangerous vision of the fragmentation of society in France”, and while it didn’t present racism openly, “it is always implicit that the enemy is always a foreigner, a north African or a Muslim, held as responsible for French people’s difficulties. So they bring a kind of atmosphere of racism to France, which is foul and which we’re fighting against.”
Cécile Alduy, a professor at Stanford University and a specialist on Le Pen’s party, has analysed two years of Bardella’s speeches. She said they were “as if copy pasted from Marine Le Pen and Jean-Marie Le Pen. It’s still the same triad of immigration, identity and Islam. The big difference is tone and style. The message is the same but delivered in a really smooth, poised and calm, tone of voice.”
Whereas Marine Le Pen could be mocking and sarcastic, Bardella delivered his put-downs calmly, Alduy said: “He’s a magazine-ready figure for the far right, everything clean-cut and neat, white smile … He goes even further in softening the party image – smoothing things out so that it feels banal, normal and mainstream.”
This is possible in part because the far-right’s ideas have become more ingrained in the political debate, with other parties borrowing their rhetoric on immigration, crime and the threat to civilisation.
Stewart Chau, the director of polling at Vérian group, said long-term studies showed French voters were increasingly adhering to the National Rally’s reading of society’s problems and its proposed solutions. “Never before have so many French people considered the National Rally as a completely legitimate party,” Chau said. “From the point of view of public opinion, that is a paradigm shift.”
Chau said the renamed party had “detached itself from the whiff of sulphur that surrounded it when it was the Front National set up by Jean-Marie Le Pen”. People no longer focused on the racist, antisemitic positions associated with the party’s founder, he said.
Antoine Bristielle, the director of opinion at the Fondation Jean Jaurès thinktank, said Bardella was expected to beat Macron’s centrist candidate, Valérie Hayer, in the European elections with a clear margin. “This will have a huge influence on the whole public debate in France until the next presidential elections in 2027 because the main focus will be who and how to stop a scenario where the National Rally could win the presidential vote,” he said.
“The idea is they’re not fascists, they’re credible,” said an engineer in his 30s who voted for the party and met Bardella at the fair.
“I should have brought a banner saying: ‘I love you,’” said one 15-year-old girl. Her father, a fairground worker, added: “This man could save France.”
The last Vérian barometer in December showed that for the first time since 1984 more French people thought the National Rally was not a danger (45%) than thought it was a danger (41%).
The National Rally (RN) continues its dynamic of reconquest in a very clear manner.
The RN continues its dynamic of reconquest in a very clear way:
- support for its ideas is progressing for the 7th consecutive year,
- the French have never been so numerous to consider that he does not present danger and that he has the capacity to participate in a government,
- and he embodies, finally, for a majority of them (including on the left) the main force of opposition to Emmanuel Macron and his government.
The trivialization and credibility of the National Rally continues
For the 7th consecutive year, support for the ideas put forward by the RN is strengthening – 33% of French people support its ideas (+2). With an increase of 9 points since 2018, it almost reached its highest level observed in February 2014 (34%).
The proportion of French people who say they disagree with her ideas has never been so low since 1984 at 54%, just like the proportion of those who do not agree with either the findings or the solutions that Marine Le Pen proposes: they are in fact 38% today, or 19 points less than in 2018.
While almost one in two French people consider that the RN has become more moderate in recent years (47%, + 5 points), almost half of the population (46%) today validates at least the observations expressed by Marine Le Pen ; and among these French people 18% (+ 7 points) agree with both the findings and the solutions it proposes: here too, this is the highest score ever recorded.
For the first time since 1984, more French people think that the RN presents no danger (45%), than think that it presents one (41%). The share of those who think he represents a danger for democracy has even fallen by 17 points since 2018.
This trivialization of the National Rally is driven by the growing credibility of the party but also of its elected officials. This concerns 4 dimensions and reaches levels never before observed:
· A credibility of its capacity to win an electoral fight and therefore to access power which is consolidated. The hypothesis of access to power is, in fact, less and less doubtful in the eyes of the French: almost 2 out of 3 French people (65%, +3 points) consider that the RN could one day access power.
· A growing credibility, and never before seen, of its capacity to participate in a government: for the first time again, more French people consider that the RN is a party which has the capacity to participate in a government (43%, +3 points compared to last year and +15 points compared to 2018) considering that it is only intended to bring together opposition votes (39%, -4 points compared to last year and -23 points since 2018).
· The latter being supported by the attitude of RN deputies whose image is improving: a majority of French people thus consider that they are deputies like the others (60%, +2 points), that they are present and involved (55%, +1 point) and that they respect the rules of the Assembly (50%, +2 points). At the same time, the share of those who judge them to be aggressive and xenophobic or racist has declined very clearly: 33% (-6 points) and 29% (-10 points) respectively think so.
· Finally, a process of giving credibility to the party to embody an opposition to Emmanuel Macron and his government: the RN seems to embody in the eyes of the French the only real opposition to Emmanuel Macron and his government, thus recording the failure of the NUPES to endorse this role including in the eyes of his own supporters. A narrow majority of French people (51%, +11 points) consider that the RN is the main force of opposition to Emmanuel Macron and his government, far ahead of NUPES (20%, -13 points) and Les Républicains (4% , +1 point). This observation is shared by everyone and is even clearly reinforced this year: 49% (+24 points) of NUPES supporters, 50% (+3 points) of LR supporters and even 60% (+14 points) of Renaissance supporters share this opinion. .
A partial shift of LR supporters
This double dynamic is particularly observed among Les Républicains supporters.
- While there are many more of them than the average who find that the party has moderated (64%, -3 points compared to 47% of French people), a majority of them today adhere to the ideas of the RN (53 %, + 26 points)
- Their view of RN deputies has improved significantly: 86% (+20 points) consider that they are deputies like the others, 85% (+14 points) that they are present and involved and 71% ( +13 points) that they respect the rules of the Assembly. They are also much less likely this year to think that they make xenophobic or racist comments (38%, – 16 points) or that they are aggressive (26%, – 27 points).
- Thus, a majority today considers that the party does not represent a danger for democracy (61%, + 20 points), this is a first in the history of the barometer and this proportion has jumped in one year…
- Just like the fact that 51% think that LR should make electoral alliances with the RN depending on the circumstances (+11 points).
This shift nevertheless remains partial when it comes to the practice of power…
- Only 14% consider that the RN would do better than the current government to improve the situation in France, less than the average French person (18%) and especially than RN supporters (65%).
- And only 11% consider that the RN is the only party that can do politics differently, a level lower than the average of French people (19%) and RN supporters (56%).
… but also their ideological alignment: if a majority of them still consider that there are too many immigrants in France (70%, + 2 points) or that the Islamic veil should be banned (70% , + 2 points), fewer of them than RN supporters consider that more power should be given to the police (66% compared to 86% of RN supporters), and consider that we no longer really feel at home in France (40% against 83%), that State Medical Aid (AME) must be abolished (41% against 73%) or to consider that the construction of Europe threatens the identity of France (33% versus 66%).
If the image of Marie Le Pen is consolidated, that of Jordan Bardella is being built
The image of Marine Le Pen, which had significantly improved in terms of her human dimensions and her political capacities last year, is consolidated this year to return to the pre-2017 level on almost all dimensions. She is thus judged to be strong-willed (66%, – 1 point), capable of making decisions (56%, – 1 point) and understanding daily problems (50%, + 2 points) for a majority of French people. Her ability to unite beyond her camp (48%, +3 points) but also to make a good President of the Republic (34%, +6 points) is progressing this year.
This year again, she is perceived more as the representative of a patriotic right and attached to traditional values (48%, =) than as the representative of a nationalist and xenophobic extreme right (34%, – 2 points). A perception which is clearly progressing among LR supporters (73%, + 22 points) and Renaissance (51%, + 16 points).
She finally benefits from an effect of contrast which this year has the particularity of coming from her right with Eric Zemmour but also from her left with Jean-Luc Mélenchon. If it continues to represent a danger to
democracy in the eyes of the French (51%, – 3 points), it is today on par with Jean-Luc Mélenchon (49%, + 10 points compared to last year and + 20 points in 2 years) and less afraid that Éric Zemmour (68%, =).
The young president of the National Rally sees his image consolidated and improved as much on his personality as on his political line:
- Jordan Bardella is today judged capable of making decisions by 38% of French people (+10) and of rallying beyond his camp by 35% (+10). Nearly 30% believe that he understands the daily problems of the French (33%, +6) and that he has new ideas to solve France’s problems (28%, +7).
- More perceived as friendly and warm (30%, +9), he is also improving in his ability to inspire honesty and trust (28%, +6) in the French.
A context favorable to the RN, that of a toughening on the subjects of justice, Islam and immigration
- Justice: 71% of French people do not consider it severe enough with petty criminals (+10 points in 1 year), a record level not reached since 2003
- Wearing the Islamic veil: 53% believe that it should be banned in public spaces (+8 points), a level never observed in the history of the barometer
- Immigration: 52% say there are too many immigrants in France (+7 points)
- European construction: a few months before the next European election, European construction is seen as a threat to the identity of France by 34% of French people (+5 points), again a record.
Although it is becoming more commonplace and gaining credibility, normalization is not complete: for a still significant proportion of French people (41%) this party represents a danger for democracy in France; half of French people also do not support neither to the findings nor to the solutions expressed by Marine Le Pen.
Finally, the National Rally does not yet provide concrete answers and these dynamics do not allow it to distinguish itself positively from other political groups, quite the contrary: in the eyes of the French, it remains a party which does politics like the others (63%), with deputies like the others (60%), and who for a majority of French people would do no better than the current government to improve the situation in the country.
RN Being Cautious
Chief Jordan Bardella has vowed to work together with other anti-EU forces to create a blocking majority and essentially kill what he described as a “federalist coup d’état” pushed forward by Europhiles.
Bardella appeared cautious about the current polls, currently showing his party ranking first, and attempted to fish votes from the French centre-right as well as downplay fears about potential electoral losses toward Reconquête!, another far-right party whose EU list is led by Marine Le Pen’s niece.
“The European elections are shaping up to be very complicated for the presidential majority,” Bardella, who also heads his party’s list for the EU elections, told the press on Friday.
For now, polls for the French and other far-right parties seem promising and wining on all fronts.
In France, the latest polls suggest that Bardella’s Rassemblement National has just over 28% of intentions to vote, well ahead of its closest rival, Macron’s presidential majority group Renaissance (Renew Europe), currently polling around 18%. Very low to all major parties in the race.
At the EU level, George V Magazine partner Europe Elects, which produces forecasts based on the average of national polls, projects that the far right ID group in the EU Parliament will be the third political force, behind EU centre-right and the socialists.
Still, while Bardella appears cautious about the polls, he is trying to look and analyze votes from the centre-right Les Républicains (EPP), currently polling at 11%.
He has already called on “voters close to Les Républicains come and work alongside us”, stressing that polls “indicate a dynamic, but they are photographs at a given moment”.
In any event, if Reconquête! candidates were to join the European Parliament, they would sit in the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).
An EU blocking majority
Far from worrying about this, Bardella instead recalled the ties between ID and ECR, some members of which have been working hand in hand for several years.
“We have stepped up our contacts with potential partners”, which, for example, include Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party and the Spanish VOX party, he said.
Asked about merging ID and ECR, Bardella said he does not know, though it goes without saying that the aim is to “create a blocking minority” to break the current majority coalition made up of the EPP, Renew Europe and the Socialists (Socialists and Democrats, S&D).
Already, Bardella is pleased with narrowing the voting gap on several texts, such as the reform of the EU treaties.
According to Bardella, these two texts illustrate the “debate between two great visions of society” that could materialise during the elections – with Rassemblement National and its allies favouring greater national sovereignty and those favouring a more integrated Europe.
Indeed, “restoring France’s voice in Europe at a time when a veritable federalist coup d’état is being prepared” will be one of the key axes of the French far-right party’s programme, Bardella added as he expressed readiness to wage a “civilisational battle”.
Meanwhile, Bardella also outlined the main thrusts of the party’s full programme, which will be unveiled on 3 March.
EU elections: Mid-terms for French elections
In addition to the battle against federalism, Rassemblement National wants to tackle the issues of EU agriculture, immigration enlargement, AI, and environmental policies.
However, for Bardella, the EU elections on 9 June are more than just a stepping stone to the French presidential elections in 2027.
“The political party that comes out on top [in the 2024 elections] will probably be the one in charge of the alternation after 2027”, he said.
He explained that EU elections are “the last opportunity to sanction the policies of the government and Emmanuel Macron”, like American-style mid-terms.
However, the duel between Bardella and Renaissance could begin earlier than expected, especially as Bardella said he “wishes to debate” to Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, to whom he already wished “good luck”.
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