Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella – the ticket to power of the French far-right party
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen and party leader Jordan Bardella smiled brightly as they presented their “tickets” to voters with the goal of taking power in 2027 — with her as president and him as prime minister.
Using the English-language roots, the duo’s official introduction in January was a novel move in the French political landscape, where the president is directly elected and the post holds powerful institutional functions. Prime ministers are then appointed to run the government and are often sacrificed when presidents need to reset in a crisis.
General annoucement interview emphasizes how Le Pen has anointed Bardella 28 years old as the face of the new, professional Rassemblement Nationale (RN) party that she has spent more than a decade building. She has bet that her chances of succeeding her longtime rival, centrist President Emmanuel Macron, will be stronger with Bardella by her side.
Le Pen told the Financial Times last week that she had come up with the “ticket” as part of a strategy to prepare the French public for the RN vote. “The more people know about us and the more they know exactly what we will do, the more they can turn away from the caricatures and fears about us that our opponents have stirred up,” she said.
But now the strength of the relationship between Le Pen, 55, and her much younger lieutenant could be tested in the political turmoil caused by Macron’s decision to call. quick election for Congress. The President gave it shocking move after his centrist coalition was defeated in this month’s European elections, where the RN list led by Bardella won 31% of the vote to his 15%.
In the first round of Sunday’s two-round legislative election, the anti-immigration, populist RN party has surged again, raising the possibility that Bardella could be installed as prime minister within weeks. Projections from pollster Ipsos show the RN at 34 percent, putting it on track to win the most seats in parliament and potentially even an outright majority in the final round of voting on July 7.
RNs do appear experienced in appealing to those worried about the cost of living amid inflation, and has exploited discontent over declining public services while capitalizing on anger in Great President Macron.
Despite the duo’s slick sales pitch, Le Pen and Bardella still have a radical agenda that could shock French society. It includes policies such as cutting immigration, ending birthright citizenship and creating “national priority” for French citizens in social housing and welfare programs.
Inside the Elysée Palace, officials have long privately suggested that the pair would battle it out for power, seizing on recent polls showing that protégé Bardella has eclipsed mentor Le Pen’s popularity and that many would welcome his ascension to the presidency more favorably than hers.
Asked if he might put Le Pen aside to run himself in 2027, Bardella told the FT: “No, no, no. I don’t have that ambition.” He has a large portrait of himself and Le Pen hanging in his office and still uses a formal style. Friend to talk to her, even though she told him he didn’t have to.
“I am not sad to see that he is more popular than me in the polls, on the contrary, I am happy… I will need a popular prime minister to govern France,” Le Pen added.
In 2011, Le Pen officially take it about the movement that Jean-Marie’s father helped create nearly 40 years ago. But before that, she believed that the party needed to distance itself from the baggage of its founders, including her father and journalist Pierre Bousquet, who was in the French division of the Waffen-SS during World War II.
With historical roots in fascism, the Front National (FN), as the party was originally known, remained on the fringes of French politics because of Jean-Marie. He was convicted in 1990 of hate speech charges for once likening Nazi gas chambers to a “detail of history”.
France at the time was still reckoning with the historical legacy of Vichy’s collaboration with the Nazis, making the FN radioactive to most voters. At age 8, when Le Pen was growing up as the youngest of three daughters in Paris, a massive bomb aimed at her father destroyed the family home. No one was injured, and the crime was never solved.
After training as a lawyer, Le Pen practiced for about six years before entering the family business: politics. In 2002, Jean-Marie unexpectedly lost the presidential election, sparking mass anti-FN protests that led to a landslide victory for incumbent Jacques Chirac.
According to Louis Aliot, the mayor of Perpignan, who split from Jean-Marie to stand by his daughter, with whom he had been in a relationship, it was then that his daughter decided to change things. “We are both from the younger generation, so we are not haunted by the past,” he said. “After the protests against us, we decided that we had to change the FN from within.”
The project of “detoxifying” the party became Le Pen’s mission. She changed the name in 2018, a classic marketing strategy to make voters forget the past. She has. expelled her party’s father in 2015, and purged other radical elements, although critics say traces of its anti-Semitic, racist past remain. She gradually changed the RN’s platform to emphasize cost-of-living issues and exploit the contempt that Parisian elites have for rural areas.
With Macron, Le Pen had her perfect opponent — a former banker, a product of France’s top educational institutions and a technocrat who wants to liberalize the economy and boost the EU.
But in the 2017 presidential election, she lost to him by a wide margin, hurt by a weak debate performance. That failure pushed her and the RN leadership into a soul-searching. She and her closest staff have sought to rebuild both by deepening their policy expertise on issues ranging from defense to the economy, while also training a team of New politicians were established at the local level. They are known as the “generation of marines.”
Among them is Bardella.who said he first saw Le Pen on stage at a rally when he was 16 years old. She impressed him so much that he joined her party the next day, continuing to promote it in his hometown of Saint-Denis, a working-class and immigrant area in the south. north of Paris, where he lives with his mother.
In 2015, he founded a group in Saint-Denis called “Patriotic Banlieues” in an attempt to appeal to residents of diverse and disaffected neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris. According to French media, he once distributed leaflets that read “Muslims maybe, but French first.”
His activities have put him on Le Pen’s radar. They met at a gathering of young RN activists convened by the party leader at a pizzeria in Nanterre after the local elections. She sat next to him and by the end of lunch asked him to run her 2017 campaign. “I was a little scared of her because I was young,” he said, but still agreed to work.
“He seems to be a disciplined and articulate young man, who I find very French, with his dress and elegance,” Le Pen said.
Le Pen and her team helped build a narrative around Bardella, emphasizing his childhood in social housing with a divorced mother who struggled to make ends meet. He said his views were shaped by witnessing the ravages of drug trafficking and crime in his local area as well as the riots that broke out in 2005 after two barbarians teenager died during a police chase.
The actual story is a little different. According to Pierre-Stéphane Fort’s biography, Bardella’s father was a small business owner who sent him to private Catholic schools and gave him a more bourgeois education. He had not completed his university studies in geography and had never worked in the private sector.
Pascal Humeau, a communications trainer who worked with Bardella for four years, said the politician was a “pure product of marketing” who followed Le Pen’s lead. Humeau helped him adopt a more confident speaking style and start every media appearance with direct, strong eye contact. cordially greet. “Who is Jordan Bardella really? We don’t know,” he said.
When Le Pen bypassed many more senior officials to put the then 23-year-old at the top of the RN list for the 2019 European elections, some warned her that it was too risky. He finished first, one point ahead of Macron’s list.
With Bardella, RN has won the support of some segments of the electorate previously wary of Le Pen, including women, office workers with degrees and the business community. As the most influential person in French politics, he has a large following on TikTok, helping to attract young voters. He also focuses more on identity politics than Le Pen, recent statement that there is a “culture war” that needs to be fought against Islamism in France.
Will the “ticket” win or will it fail as the opponent predicted?
“The ticket is very sturdy,” Bardella told the FT sarcastically. “It’s printed on thick paper that won’t tear.”
Additional reporting by Adrienne Klasa
