The RN president highlights the story of his Italian grandparents, without mentioning an Algerian ancestor. This descendant of immigrants constructs a story that serves his political discourse.
Who would have thought a few years ago that a twenty-something, with rather limited political and work experience, could be considered a serious option to govern France? Jordan Bardella’s popularity among RN activists and far-right sympathisers has allowed the young man to quickly become a leading political figure, and the crushing victory of the National Rally in the last European elections has finished making him a pillar of public life.
Jordan Bardella now seems destined to mark French political life for a long time. At only 28 years old, the president of the National Rally can count on a career lasting several decades, as his leadership of the French far-right party now appears both assured and very little contested. Whether or not he becomes Prime Minister in July, he unquestionably embodies the renewal of the party created and led by the Le Pens for more than 40 years. And that is no small feat, the young man has foreign origins that he claims and on which he relies to talk about integration, identity and immigration.
A youth in the “9-3”
Moreover, Jordan Bardella, who is used to social networks and the staging of his image on Tik Tok, likes to talk about himself and his career. The young man has even written an autobiography which should be published in September 2024, in which he addresses very personal subjects and evokes his family. He has also already recorded several sequences of the show Intimate Ambition by Karine Le Marchand, which will be broadcast on M6 in a few months, unless the political agenda changes and he prefers that this television moment dedicated to him and his loved ones be postponed. The leader of the extreme right, however young and inexperienced he may be, apparently intends to make his family past an element of communication.
Because if Jordan Bardella was born in September 1995 in Drancy, in the suburbs of Paris, this is not the case for part of his family, especially his parents. His mother, Luisa Bertelli-Mota, was born in 1962 near Turin, to Italian parents, Severino Bertelli-Motta and Iolanda Benedetto. Both of Jordan Bardella’s maternal grandparents lived in Nichelino before emigrating to the suburbs of Paris in 1963.
The father of the RN leader is himself of Italian and Franco-Algerian origin, according to information from Jeune Afrique. His paternal grandmother is in fact the daughter of an Algerian from Kabylie, Mohand Séghir Mada, born in Guendouz. This man settled in France in the 1930s in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, to work in the textile and construction industry.
Italian origins highlighted
With his family history, Jordan Bardella has woven a well-crafted narrative about his Italian origins for several years. “I came from elsewhere, became from here,” he now says at the podium of his meetings, although he spent his entire youth and young adult life in Seine-Saint-Denis. And the native of Drancy adds, as if he himself had immigrated to France with a desire to assimilate: “I made the republican effort.”
The verse is also quickly found for someone who has three out of four grandparents born in Italy: “I am 75% Italian”, he repeats at will, in public meetings or on television sets. And to hammer home that the RN, like the FN before it, has the slogan “France is earned, or it is inherited”. Understand: my family and my grandparents integrated through work in France and through their desire to blend into French culture. History does not say, however, what his grandparents thought, who could read on Jean-Marie Le Pen’s posters in the 1980s “1 million unemployed is 1 million immigrants too many!”
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A notable discretion about his Algerian great-grandfather
History also does not say why Jordan Bardella is very discreet about his distant Algerian origins. Perhaps because the far right is not the most inclined to be kind to the immigrant population from Algeria. In July 2023, Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, a fervent defender of a union of the far right, had these words at a rally: “42% of Algerians have no activity in France and they represent the first foreign nationality in prison. We are not Algeria’s daycare!”
Jordan Bardella’s direct origins are much less original than he wants us to believe. The RN leader grew up in Drancy, a town in Seine-Saint-Denis. He began his schooling there before continuing his studies at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, although he did not complete his university studies, preferring to devote himself fully to political activism. Very quickly spotted by Marine Le Pen, he would experience a meteoric rise.
A lightning rise to the far right
The young man joined the National Front in 2012, at just 16 years old. A very early commitment testifies to his very identity-based convictions, while Marine Le Pen’s party then had no significant parliamentary experience or the stripes of current notability. Jordan Bardella quickly climbed the party ladder: in 2015, he became parliamentary assistant, in 2017 he was appointed spokesperson for the FN, and in 2018, he headed Génération Nation, the youth branch of the RN.
At the same time, the young man met Kerridwen Chatillon, the daughter of the sulphurous RN advisor Frédéric Chatillon, then Nolwenn Olivier, the granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, with whom he was in a relationship until very recently. A relationship that underlines his close ties, behind the scenes, with the founding family of the RN.
In 2019, at just 23 years old, Jordan Bardella led the RN list in the European elections and was elected as a Member of the European Parliament. His campaign propelled him to the forefront of the political scene. In 2021, he was appointed interim president of the RN by Marine Le Pen, then elected president of the party in 2022, officially succeeding Marine Le Pen.