Jordan Bardella is not employee of the month at the European Parliament. It is little invested in it, its legislative record is poor. When he is in Strasbourg, the MEP has better things to do than to mull over obscure amendments to the common agricultural policy (CAP). For example, chatting with your Republican colleagues (LR). The president of the National Rally (RN) knows them all. Brice Hortefeux finds him “very nice”; Nadine Morano “gets along well with him”; François-Xavier Bellamy praises his “cordiality”. He established a solid relationship with Geoffroy Didier, whom he knew at the Ile-de-France Regional Council. During the presidential election, the two men exchanged messages on behalf of their respective candidates. It was during a parliamentary session that the frontist probed his colleague at the end of 2021 on the holding of a debate between Marine Le Pen and Valérie Pécresse. Jordan Bardella theorizes in front of Eric Ciotti’s lieutenant the planned disappearance of LR, the latter tempers his ardor. “The favorite’s place is the dead man’s.”
Jordan Bardella likes to play with the nerves of a party on borrowed time. The National Rally (RN) feels carried by the wind of history, when the right is fighting for its survival. How can you resist a place on the RN list, promised a historic score on June 9? “Nadine, you come, whenever you want!”, he tells her. François-Xavier Bellamy is entitled to the same considerations on February 14, 2023, in the middle of the parliamentarians’ canteen. “You need to join us.” Seduction takes place in broad daylight, that is where its interest lies. This must be known. Thus is written the story of an attractive party, which completes its demonization by courting elected officials from the Republican right. And if it works, great!
Winks to the right-wing electorate
How far away it seems, the takeover bid carried out in 2007 by Nicolas Sarkozy on the frontist electorate. The predator has become prey. Crowned with a feeling of omnipotence, the RN plays cat and mouse with LR. He doesn’t care, sometimes. “Come to us!”, RN deputies shout to the National Assembly to highlight their convergences on immigration. So the uselessness of their peers. The nouveau riche also practice almsgiving. In March 2023, Jordan Bardella promises to spare the LR deputies who will bring down the government, in the event of dissolution. In politics, charity is a humiliation.
The boss of the RN plows fertile land. The right has moved closer to the historic positions of the RN on immigration. She proposes to free herself from European rules and rails against justice, a supposed obstacle to increased control of flows. During the 2021 LR primary, Éric Ciotti spoke out in favor of a “national and European community priority [pour] employment, benefits and housing.
This ideological shift is reciprocal. Exit the “frexit” or the exit from the Euro: the RN has moderated its sovereignist ardor to broaden its electoral base, despite a more statist economic program than that of LR. In this quest for enlargement, Jordan Bardella winks at the right-wing electorate: mixed in is a speech that is more pro-business than that of Marine Le Pen – he pinpoints the “delusional level of charges in our country” – and a more identity melody. He never defines himself as a right-wing man, but LR knows how to recognize his own. “It’s a shame that you went to the RN. You had your place with us,” Nadine Morano confided to him a few years ago after leaving a television set.
Among voters, it works. His rating among LR supporters exceeds that of the ex-boss of the RN. In Strasbourg, LR members who come to visit Parliament ask him for selfies. And that’s all. “Bardella tries to contact people in all directions, an LR leader believes. He would like to broaden the spectrum and display war shots, like ex-executives. But I don’t have the impression that it works.” LR senators and deputies know little about the young man, far from Parliament.
LR is a drunken boat, but everyone stays on board. No defection of parliamentarians or dignitaries. Defectors are rare and meet the same profile: second-rate personalities or people with no future in the party. RN deputy Sébastien Chenu was excluded from the municipal elections in Paris in 2014, when MEP Thierry Mariani was not in Laurent Wauquiez’s favor in 2019.
Condescension towards the RN
The popularity of Jordan Bardella changes nothing: joining the far-right group is a heavy act. It can bring social opprobrium to anyone who risks it. A few good words from sovereignist Jean-Philippe Tanguy do not erase the party’s sulphurous history. The highlighting of Nicolas Sarkozy’s latest book in a video of the president of the RN is a detail which does not make us forget that of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Thierry Mariani essentially confided it to an LR executive: “It took me a while to get through it. Because socially, explaining that we are going to join the RN is not that easy.” Demonization is easier in the secrecy of the voting booth than in front of a television camera. “Despite your evolution, you are marked with a seal,” said Brice Hortefeux to MEP Jean-Paul Garraud, who worked for the UMP.
And then, the right harbors condescension towards the RN. That of the famous “government party” towards the protest group. LR has dozens of former ministers in its ranks, its shadow advisers come from major state bodies. He looks at this rival with its weak pool of executives. In the Assembly, RN deputies are quicker to obey the orders of Marine Le Pen than to shine in the making of the law. “People like Bardella are of the deepest superficiality, judges Lot MP Aurélien Pradié. There are no ideologically very structured personalities among them. They stumble over over-discipline and over-allegiance to Le Pen. Someone like Jean-Philippe Tanguy thinks until she asks him not to think anymore.” Didn’t the 88 RN deputies vote as one for the Immigration law, after having crushed it in the media? Political moves feed the press, but can exasperate elected officials. François-Xavier Bellamy concludes: “The RN is a party of people who do not work.”
Eric Ciotti thus likes to compare the quality of the LR law proposals on immigration to that of his rival. “I am not sure that the RN can do a 10th of what we have done.” Laurent Wauquiez was ironic last spring about a hypothetical appointment of Sébastien Chenu to Matignon to underline the supposed incapacity of the RN to exercise power. “We remain in the idea that the RN is condemned to achieve good scores in the first round, and lose in the second,” notes Brice Hortefeux. François-Xavier Bellamy theorized it at the heart of the last presidential election. “If Le Pen clearly fails, the RN will appear for what it is and what Zemmour thrived on: a party that cannot win and ghettoizes its electorate.” These successive failures leave their mark.
“If we make less than 5% in the Europeans…”
Grieving is a long process. For political parties, it is sometimes endless. The right still wants to believe in an autonomous destiny and reconnect with its glorious past. Its economic differences with the RN are its reason for being. She invokes them ad nauseam, regardless of the pledges given by Jordan Bardella to employers. His hope: that the end of macronism opens a new political space in 2027.
The shooting window is narrow. But its existence does not encourage anyone to take off in 2024. No one has an interest in revealing their game too early and alienating their family. The horizon is too vague to allow ourselves a one-way trip. The 2024 Europeans are a first crash test. “If we do less than 5%, there is a risk that executives will turn to the National Rally saying that there are no longer any real possibilities for LR to have a candidate in the presidential election and that we must now make our mark elsewhere. People will choose the RN,” said an LR leader. But the real end of the story will be written in 2027. The start or the end. Rebirth or disintegration.
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