Jordan Bardella at the European Parliament in Strasbourg in September 2022.
The protege of Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, is leading France’s National Rally party to victory in elections. Stacy Meichtry and Noemie Bisserbe report in The Wall Street Journal:
For a glimpse into what the future holds for nationalist parties that are now ascendant across Europe, look no further than Jordan Bardella.
At 28 years old, the French politician is soft-spoken, social-media savvy and apparently unbothered by the historical baggage that has long weighed down his political mentor, Marine Le Pen.
On Sunday, Bardella led Le Pen’s far-right opposition party, National Rally, to its biggest victory ever in European elections, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve France’s National Assembly and call snap elections in late June and early July. If National Rally prevails at the ballot box in that contest, Bardella is positioned to become prime minister.
Bardella’s victory Sunday drew upon a wellspring of support he has cultivated among younger generations of French voters who—removed from the horrors of World War II—are largely tuning out Macron and his attempts to link Europe’s newest nationalists to the authoritarian movements of the 20th century. A survey of 3,001 people by pollster Elabe found that 32% of those ages 19-34 voted for Bardella on Sunday, compared with 5% for Macron’s candidate.
Public anxiety over the possibility of far-right forces rising to power—as they once had in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Vichy France—has been a defining feature of French elections for decades, helping to drive turnout among voters who delivered Macron the presidency twice.
In calling early elections, Macron is betting that a similar coalition of voters from mainstream conservative and leftist parties will once again back him in a “republican front” to keep National Rally out of power. It is a significant gamble that risks hobbling Macron’s presidency right as France prepares to host the Summer Olympics. Macron’s party has previously benefited from France’s two-round election system, which allows voters who first cast ballots for a losing candidate to then rally behind a different one, typically a mainstream candidate, in the runoff.
The stigma around National Rally, however, has begun to fade with every passing election. National Rally maintains its strident anti-immigrant stance, but its ideas are no longer fringe. Bardella, meanwhile, is a nimble politician who thrives at threading the needle between National Rally’s dark past and his own ambitions to push the party into the mainstream.
Bardella made a point of attending a march against antisemitism that was held after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Days before, a television interviewer asked him whether Jean-Marie Le Pen—co-founder of the party and father of Marine Le Pen—was an antisemite. In the 1980s, Jean-Marie Le Pen had notoriously described Nazi death camps as a mere “detail” of history—a claim he repeated in 2015.
“I was born in 1995. You’re talking to me about an era I didn’t experience,” Bardella said, before adding: “I don’t believe Jean-Marie Le Pen is an antisemite. Now I obviously wouldn’t make the comments he made about the ‘detail’ because, for me, the horrors of the Holocaust aren’t a detail of history.”
While Bardella is a political protégé of Marine Le Pen, he doesn’t bear the political weight of her family’s name. Instead, he has made a name for himself on TikTok and other social-media platforms, where clips of his repartee with political opponents tend to go viral.
When Macron outraged French farmers with a plan to reduce diesel-fuel subsidies as part of his efforts to encourage France’s economy to go green, Bardella turned up at Paris’s annual agricultural fair and was greeted like a rock star, petting livestock and posing for selfies with giddy fairgoers—images that flooded the Internet.
Read more here.
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