The president of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, has Italian and Algerian origins. He regularly mentions his mother and father.
At 28, he has become one of the key figures in French politics and could find himself at Matignon after the second round of the legislative elections on Sunday. Born on September 13, 1995 in Drancy, in Seine-Saint-Denis, Jordan Bardella built his argument on his roots in the Parisian suburbs – although he left them long ago. An only child, the president of the RN was born from the union of Olivier Bardella, born in 1968 in Montreuil and Luisa Bertelli-Mota, born in 1962 in Turin, Italy.
Jordan Bardella has never hidden his origins: Algerian and Italian. Three of his four grandparents are Italian. Luisa Bertelli-Motta, the politician’s mother, comes from a working-class background in Turin, before immigrating to France in the 1960s. There, she became an ATSEM (Territorial Agent specializing in nursery schools). “My mother lives in a council house in Saint-Denis. I represent modest origins and social fiber,” Jordan Bardella boasted in the columns of Release in 2018.
Jordan Bardella’s father, Olivier Bardella, was born from the union of Guerrino Bardella – born in 1944 in a city in the Italian Lazio and who also immigrated to France in the 1960s to become a mason, then a plumber – and Réjane Mada, born in Seine-et-Marne. The latter’s father was born in Algeria, in Aït R’zine, in the north of the country and settled in France in the 1930s.
“My parents come from a generation that has integrated.”
The Bardella family is therefore among the many Italians exiled in France until the 1960s, for economic reasons. “Indeed, Bardella is of Italian origin. But my parents come from a generation that integrated, that assimilated, that worked hard, that loved France. At home, they didn’t let me hang around outside all night,” declared the politician in Draguignan, a town that welcomed many Italian immigrants, reports The world.
Jordan Bardella was only a year and a half old when his parents separated. He grew up in joint custody, between Montmorency and Deuil-la-Barre, in Val-d’Oise, and rarely saw his father, the same newspaper reported last May. He also explained that his father, Olivier Bardella, was not registered on the electoral lists before voting for him in the 2019 European elections.