The French would love to know who the real Jordan Bardella is.
The question was interesting when Bardella was just president of the country’s largest party, the radical right-wing Rassemblement National (National Regroupment — RN).
Now that he is openly talked about as the country’s next prime minister, the issue has taken on an air of urgency.
In two weeks, France goes to the polls in the early parliamentary election called by the country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, after being defeated by the RN in the European Parliament elections at the beginning of the month.
If the RN achieves another big victory after the second round of voting on July 7, the expectation is that Bardella — who shares the party leadership with Marine Le Pen — will be named prime minister.
All French people know the basics about Bardella and his meteoric rise: from unemployed young man who abandoned his studies in the northern suburbs of Paris to Le Pen protégé and party president.
They know he is very young, only 28 years old, but that seems to matter less nowadays, when experience no longer counts for much. The current president is just 46 years old, and the prime minister is 35.
They also know that he is always elegant, speaks well, and is ultra-presentable.
But what he thinks, how he positions himself ideologically, what kind of person he is — all of this is unknown. The French have the distinct feeling that the man they see is a package deal. Well wrapped, but the contents are a mystery.
Descendant of immigrants
The official version of Bardella — the one on the label — is that of a young man who grew up in a disadvantaged community in Seine-Saint-Denis and, after living with the scourge of drugs, poverty, illegality and uncontrolled immigration, came to believe that only the radical right had the answer.
This is the official narrative, known as storytelling in the marketing world.
As he himself said: “I am in politics because of everything I experienced there. To prevent this from becoming the norm for all of France. Because what happens there is not normal.”
The truth, however, is more nuanced. Bardella was, in fact, raised by a single mother, Luisa, in the Cité Gabriel-Péri housing estate in Saint-Denis, so his experience is quite real. His parents are of Italian origin, and his father had an Algerian grandmother.
But Bardella’s father, Olivier, who left home when his son was very young, ran a drinks distribution company and was relatively well off. He lived in Montmorency.
And Bardella did not attend the nearest public school, but rather a semi-private Catholic educational institution popular with the middle class.
“Little Bardella had one foot on each side of the tracks,” says Pierre-Stéphane Fort, author of a critical biography of the RN president.
To write a recent profile in the French newspaper Le Monde, the authors returned to Saint-Denis to meet Bardella’s childhood friends and acquaintances.
They found that he had left little trace. Friends — of varying racial backgrounds — said he loved video games, and created a YouTube channel to discuss the latest releases.
They also recalled that he gave literacy classes to immigrants after school, when he was 16 years old. But they did not recall any particular interest in radical right politics.
“My theory is that he looked around the political world and identified the place where he had the best chance of rising through the ranks,” Chantal Chatelain, a teacher who taught at his school, told Le Monde.
Bardella joined the party at age 17, and his rise was meteoric. This happened because he became part of Le Pen’s inner circle.
Much of the RN’s top brass revolves around personal relationships and clan loyalty, as was the case when Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, was at the head of the party, which was known at the time as the National Front (FN). Bardella began dating the daughter of an FN veteran, Frederick Chatillon.
A few days after he was introduced to Le Pen in 2017, she named him party spokesperson.
In 2019, he was asked to head the party’s list of candidates in the European elections, which RN won. He became an MEP. And, in 2022, she made him party president.
According to Pascal Humeau, a media training professional who worked with Bardella for four years, Le Pen immediately saw how the young man — with his perfect history of adversity on the periphery — could be useful to the party. She called him a “lion cub.”
But Humeau is far from praising Bardella. The two walked away after an argument over money, so their testimony needs to be treated with caution. But today he describes the RN leader as a “marketing product”.
“He was an empty shell. In terms of content, there wasn’t much,” says Humeau. “He didn’t read much. He wasn’t curious. He simply absorbed the elements of language given to him by Marine.”
Humeau says he worked for months to get Bardella to leave behind his rigid posture and smile more naturally. “I had to humanize the cyborg. My job was to make people who would otherwise hate him say, ‘Hmm! For a fascist he’s cool!’”
Biographer Pierre-Stephane Fort is another critic of Bardella — according to him, there is little substance behind the personal image.
“He is a chameleon. It adapts perfectly to the environment around it,” he says. “And he is a chronic opportunist. There is no ideology there. He is pure strategy. He senses where the wind is blowing and gets there first.”
In fact, it is impossible to identify Bardella with any of the different political currents or clans in RN. At different times, he was with the “social” wing, focusing on the poor and the construction of social housing, and the “identity” wing, with a racial focus and the preservation of French culture. But, above all, he follows Le Pen.
Like her, and the party as a whole, he adopts a general position built around a tough response to crime and immigration — he has said that France is “overrun by migrants”. But in specific terms, the answers are left deliberately vague.
At a rally with Bardella, there’s no denying his popularity. Women think he’s “handsome,” and he always has a smile for a selfie with everyone.
But just pay attention for a while and you’ll hear the same figures of speech and formulas coming up over and over again.
In a recent television debate with current Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, Bardella stood his ground, but it was obvious who was the smartest. Luckily for Bardella, Attal squandered his advantage by adopting a constant smirk—exactly the kind of condescension the RN thrives on.
For Le Pen, the “lion cub” has been a great asset, and has allowed her to broaden the party’s appeal far beyond traditional social groups.
With her TikTok craze, Bardella obviously connects with young people. He regularly posts short videos of himself (prepared by a media company) for his 1.3 million followers.
It also has a good rating among people with higher education, retirees and the urban population — segments that have proven resistant to RN in the past.
But the question has not yet been answered. Is your appeal merely the result of brilliant communication? Is he the person with the right qualities?
He is 28 years old, never went to university and has no government experience. He also never worked outside of RN, except for a month during the summer at his father’s company.
Until recently, all of this would have made it inconceivable that he would be named Prime Minister of France. But do the old rules still apply?
2024-06-17 22:35:57