Amid the paté stalls and wine-tastings of a country fair, a young politician hailed as the new face of the French far right was jostled by crowds shouting for photographs and handing him tricolour flags to autograph. “Rockstar!” shouted one 18-year-old.
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. 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%).
“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.”
