In the months of uncertainty before the verdict in Marine Le Pen’s appeal against a ban from holding public office for misuse of European Parliament funds, her far-right National Rally carefully prepared a plan B as her successor.
This is the clean-cut 30-year-old Jordan Bardella: a Member of the European Parliament and party loyalist who signed up to the movement as a teenager after seeing Le Pen debate.
Bardella wrote of his upbringing in the working-class Parisian suburb of Drancy, where he was predominantly raised by his mother, a creche worker from Italy, in a political memoir that was a surprise runaway hit in 2024.
“Long gone are the days when, as a teenager, I used to watch rows break out down on the streets of the housing estate from my bedroom window,” he wrote of finding himself at the heart of a national campaign for power.
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Less emphasised in the narrative is that for part of the week he lived with his father, a successful businessman, in the fancier surrounds of Montmorency.
After a time as a teenage gaming enthusiast – he ran a YouTube channel that broadcast Call of Duty replays and commentary under the username Jordan9320 – he became enamoured of the “magic” of political debates. The “pivotal moment” was watching a debate between Le Pen and the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2012 presidential election.
Le Pen famously refused to engage with her opponent directly, instead addressing answers to the debate moderator in protest at being put up against a “minor candidate” instead of the centre-left François Hollande.
“It made me want to get into politics,” Bardella recalled of her performance. He convinced his mother to sign the required permission for him, as a minor, to join a political party.
He was already rising up the party ranks by the time he started university, and dropped out to focus on politics, assigned to lead party policy on France’s troubled suburban areas and becoming an assistant to a Member of the European Parliament in 2015.
Within two years Bardella was spokesman and a member of Le Pen’s presidential campaign team, and he became vice-president of the party at the age of 23.
Bardella was the party’s lead candidate for the European elections in 2019, and since then has worked as an MEP while building up his national profile as Le Pen’s successor. He was elected president of the party in 2022.
With polished speech and a smooth presentation, Bardella is seen within France as the next step in the National Rally’s strategy of “normalisation”: dropping some of its more extreme rhetoric to broaden its appeal and break down traditional taboos by other parties against working with the far right.
Yet the defining positions remain the same: hardline opposition to immigration as a civilisational threat, hostility to Islam, and populist politics portraying the party as underdogs fighting elites in the name of “the people”.
Bardella is seen as slightly more economically right-wing than Le Pen, as he has suggested that he might not maintain the party’s implacable opposition to raising the retirement age from 62.
The MEP has opposed “green” policies along culture war lines, fervently opposing renewable energy. Like his party, he has moderated initial opposition to same-sex marriage to accepting it as part of French law.
Though the party would hope a Bardella fresh face might turn a page on the long-running scandal over the use of European Parliamentary funds, it may not be that simple. Bardella was a parliamentary assistant at the time that the abuses central to Le Pen’s trial occurred, but was not accused of wrongdoing himself. Yet fresh investigations threaten to draw him in.
Last week, prosecutors raided locations in France, Spain, Italy and Belgium as part of an investigation into alleged misuse of funds by the pan-European political grouping that the National Rally sat within, Identity and Democracy. The group’s successor, Patriots for Europe, is chaired by Bardella.
According to a leaked internal parliamentary audit, the group awarded contracts to companies with close ties to the National Rally in breach of proper procedures and made improper donations.
Bardella said last week that the searches were “under way at the offices and homes of communications contractors who have worked with us”. He added that an investigation may be imminent “regarding a job I held for a few months at the European Parliament ... almost 12 years ago”.
It follows the filing of a formal complaint with judicial authorities in January by French anti-corruption organisation Anticor against Bardella and another party member relating to a time when they were employed as assistants in the European Parliament. The allegations, first aired in a 2024 book by Tristan Berteloot, are “that falsified documents were produced to substantiate the parliamentary work carried out by several individuals, including Jordan Bardella”, according to Anticor.
Bardella suggested that the timing of the searches was politically motivated. “As always, legal proceedings foreshadow the election calendar,” he said.
Transparency International has called for a new investigation by the European Anti-Fraud Office following allegations of improper finances by the National Rally’s political group into 2024.
The anti-corruption movement last month called on the European Parliament to “immediately take control of the group’s finances” and “refer the matter to the European Public Prosecutor”.
