Jordan Bardella succeeds Le Pen as the new foreman of the radical right in France

• Frank Renout

  correspondent France

For the first time in 50 years, France’s leading radical right-wing party has a president who is not named “Le Pen”. Members of Rassemblement National, formerly Front National, have elected MEP Jordan Bardella as their new leader. He got 84 percent of the vote.

Bardella succeeds Marine Le Pen, party president since 2011. Her father Jean-Marie Le Pen held that position for nearly 40 years.

Bardella is relatively young – 27 – and has made a rapid career within the party over the past decade. He joined as a teenager. In 2017 he became a spokesperson, in 2018 he became head of the youth section and in 2019 he participated in the European elections.

He owed all those assignments to Marine Le Pen. She always nominated him or nominated him for a position. Bardella is therefore seen as a confidant of Le Pen and according to some even as a puppet. As party president, he would mostly do what you say.

Bardella herself has already announced that she wants to pursue Le Pen’s policy. It is therefore expected that the change of direction of the party will lead to few concrete changes.

The new party leader offers Marine Le Pen the opportunity to fully focus on her work in parliament. You lead a historically large faction of your he party, with 89 seats, and can influence politics.

Friend and enemy are convinced that they want to define themselves as a serious policy. This should make it acceptable to even more voters if new presidential elections are held in 2027.

“He will put himself in the spotlight with his work in parliament and, as a serious politician, he will intervene in debates with the government,” political scientist Bruno Cautrès told NOS. “All to be a credible alternative to the upcoming presidential elections”.

Bardella is entrusted with the task of leading the party and keeping the different currents together. He has already shown that he can do it: he was already vice president of the party last year. He is also praised for his good performance in the media.

Legally, it’s not a clean slate. Justice has opened an investigation into him because he called the suburb of Trappes west of Paris a “miniature Islamic republic”. Bardella thought that the mayor of Trappes, a French of Moroccan descent, had not acted hard enough against extremism.