Who is Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s protégé who is 28 years old and is eyeing the French government leadership?

Millimetric hairstyle, smile like a toothpaste commercial, impeccable dark suit that fits him like a glove and son of an Italian immigrant. Jordan Bardella, aged 28, has once again been the big winner of the legislative elections that have brought him closer to becoming head of government.

Bardella, who had swept the European elections on June 9 – the very elections that had led to the early calling of the National Assembly elections – led the National Rally (RN) party, winning 34% of the votes (with 63% counted) in the first round on Sunday, thus opening the door to an absolute majority in the second round on July 7.

The young man of Italian blood raised in the department with the most immigrants in France is the politician of the moment and the one who can impose on French President Emmanuel Macron a complicated cohabitation that will be scrutinized throughout the world.

With the early elections decided by Macron, Marine Le Pen’s successor has managed to accelerate the process of moderation of the extreme right lepenistassociated for decades with Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s controversial father convicted by the French justice system of racism and anti-Semitism.

The young Bardella, who “seems to have come from a communications agency” – as former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls estimated to Efe – speaks in public and debates with aplomb, without fuss or loudness of voice, dismantling the myth that the ultras shout and are aggressive to show that they are right.

The favourite to occupy the Matignon palace (seat of the Government) has had a dizzying career, dedicated since his adolescence to politics, since He has almost no work experience in the private sector and never completed his higher education.

The son of an Italian woman from Turin who emigrated to France and a Frenchman with Italian and Algerian origins, Bardella has boasted in his biography that he knows the problems of immigration, which his party tirelessly denounces, like the back of his hand, having grown up in Seine-Saint-Denis.

“Land of Islamism”

This department, bordering Paris, is the one with the highest number of foreigners in France – most of them from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Bardella grew up in the town of Saint-Denis, in the Gabriel Péri social housing estate.

In the autobiography he is preparing, France’s most successful politician describes the place where he grew up as “a land of Islamism, with an open road to crime and trafficking.”

I am going into politics because of what I have seen there, so that the whole of France does not become my old neighbourhood. What was happening there was not the norm.

“I’m going into politics because of what I’ve seen there, so that the whole of France doesn’t become my old neighbourhood. What was happening there was not normal,” he says.

Bardella, an only child, also likes to recall how hard it was for his mother, who separated from his father, to make ends meet. However, Those familiar with the politician’s history accuse the young man of dramatizing his childhood and adolescence.

During the week he was with his mother, who enrolled him in private schools, far from some of the problems that exist in the public schools of Saint-Denis. And at weekends he spent them with his father, who was a small businessman living in an affluent area of ​​the Paris region.

Membership at age 17

Discreet teenager, with good grades but not extraordinary, He joined the then National Front (FN) in 2012, when he was 17, he says, more seduced by Marine Le Pen than by her father Jean-Marie, founder of the movement who had just passed the baton to her.

Bardella, who never completed his degree in geography at Paris IV-Sorbonna University, won over FN leaders with his history in the banlieues and, in 2014, was appointed departmental secretary of the party in Seine-Saint-Denis, where the far right has a marginal presence.

A year later, he became assistant to MEP Jean-François Jalkh. That same year, in 2015, Before he turned 20, he obtained his first public office as a regional councillor for the Ile de France region. After failing to be elected as a deputy in the 2017 legislative elections, he became vice president of the renamed National Group.

In 2019, he headed the RN list for the 2019 European elections, winning by a narrow margin over the Macronist candidate. In 2020, he began a relationship with one of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s granddaughters, Nolwenn Olivier.

Criticised by his opponents for his frequent absence from the work of the European Parliament, Bardella also had to respond to a recent report on French public television which revealed his closeness to the ideas of Jean-Marien Le Pen.

At the end of 2022, he made the final straw by being elected president of the RN, at the suggestion of Marine Le Pen. The relationship between the two has been the subject of debate, as, despite the appearance of harmony, some media have pointed out Marine Le Pen’s discomfort with her protégé’s excessive prominence.