France’s far-right National Coalition is already preparing to take government power after its landslide victory in the European elections.
The party immediately announced on Monday that its candidate for prime minister is the party’s young and popular chairman Jordan Bardella.
Bardella is only 28 years old and his supporters hail him as a political phenomenon. He has led the National Alliance since 2022 and managed to attract especially young people behind the party. He has as many as 1.2 million followers on the video service Tiktok.
However, according to critics, his politics lack substance, says the news website France 24.
Despite his young age, Barde does not have a yellow beak for politics: he joined the national coalition at the age of 16 and has been active in the party in several positions, among other things as vice-president. He has sat in the European Parliament for one term and now he has a new seat.
Bardella is considered loyal to the previous chairman For Marine Le Pen. Le Pen once called Bardella a “lion cub”, but nowadays already a lion, says The New York Times magazine.
Le Pen leads the party’s parliamentary group and is believed to be running for president in the 2027 elections.
A politician by profession
Bardella is a child of an Italian family who spent his childhood in a rented house in a Parisian immigrant neighborhood. The parents divorced when Bardella was one year old, and he has said that he lived with his mother in poor conditions.
Bardella has emphasized his humble background and said he represents ordinary, working France.
However, Bardella studied at the private school of Lycée Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle. The tuition fees were taken care of by his father, a small businessman, says Bardella’s acquaintance For The New York Times. Bardella left his university studies at the Sorbonne University to dedicate himself to politics, French public radio reports.
Bardella has not acquired any other professional career.
Immigration main themes
Bardella’s policy is not judged to be significantly different from Le Pen’s policy. Limiting immigration and crime prevention are the party’s top themes. The party also claimsthat immigration would endanger “French culture”.
According to the son of Italian immigrants, the problem is not immigration per se, but immigrants’ unwillingness to adapt. Specially he has warned of the dangers of Islamism to French culture as well as blamed immigration many economic challenges.
Bardella would like to limit the movement of immigrants within the EU.
He Has saidthat he is not against the EU but the way the EU works now.
The national coalition is pushing for a kind of à la carte Europe, where the member states could choose for themselves what kind of cooperation they participate in and what they don’t. The French far-right has a negative attitude towards increasing support for Ukraine.
Bardella said private news channels In an interview with BFMTV and RMC, that Ukraine should not be given weapons that can attack Russian territory.
President Emmanuel Macron Bardella has called the government a “globalist elite that is limited by EU regulations at the expense of the French people”, Time magazine tells.
Neat and calm
Marine Le Pen took over the reins of the far-right party from his father From Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2011 and has been working to make his party more salon-worthy and acceptable to more and more voters.
Under the reins of the father, the name of the party was the National Front and it clearly had a fascist stamp. Jean-Marie Le Pen received several convictions for anti-Semitic and racist statements. In addition, one of the men who founded the party in 1972 had served in the notorious Nazi armed organization, the Waffen-SS.
Under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le Pen was expelled from the party in 2015 and the rhetoric was changed to a more moderate one.
Marine Le Pen’s protege Bardella’s election as president further softens the party’s image. Bardella dresses neatly and speaks calmly and thoughtfully.
Bardella’s influence can also be seen in the party’s election events. Journalists are treated more politely than before, and people allow themselves to be photographed.
The work has paid off: In the last election, the National Alliance increased its number of parliamentary seats tenfold and became the second largest party. Marine Le Pen’s popularity has grown steadily in the presidential elections, where she has been a candidate three times.
Bardella estimates In an interview with Time magazine, that the shame of supporting the extreme right is disappearing among young people. The same is assessed by many different media interviewed French voters.
The party’s 31.5 percent vote share in the European elections is not just an election victory of eight percentage points. The vote share was more than double that of Macron’s Renaissance party, and this is the first time For 40 years, when in France no party gets more than 30 percent of the votes in the European elections.