Jordan Bardella would probably not have imagined a promotion, so big, so dazzling. Especially, when he remembers the memory of his beginnings, when he decided in 2012, at the age of 16, the day after a debate between Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to join the National Front (FN). Raised in his hometown of Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis) and from a modest family, he indicated, at the time, to have joined the party more to Marine Le Pen than for the party itself.
Two years later, in 2014, the young man of Italian origin became FN departmental secretary of Seine-Saint-Denis, which made him the youngest departmental manager of the party. From the first days in his new function, he never ceased to denounce “the wildness” and set up a collective in the suburbs, which in his eyes brought together “all the problems of France power 10”.
The suburbs, a subject that is particularly close to his heart
“Monsieur Banlieues” of the party, he became in 2015, at only 19 years old, the person in charge of the question of the National Front. In the regional elections of the same year, he was head of the FN list in Seine-Saint-Denis and was elected to the Ile-de-France regional council, with Huguette Fatna, with 14.7% of the votes in the second round. A few months later, in January 2016, he launched the Patriotic Banlieues collective, who “wants to break with city politics and reach out to voters in the Republic’s ‘lost territories'”.
It was in 2016 that he decided to devote himself exclusively to politics and the National Front: after an economic and social baccalaureate (ES) with the mention “very good” at the private high school Jean-Baptiste de La Salle in Saint-Denis obtained the previous year, he abandoned his geography studies at Paris-Sorbonne University, without graduating.
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The 2017 presidential campaign, a real turning point
In 2017, he joined the presidential campaign team, recruited by Jean-Lin Lacapelle, deputy secretary general of the FN. The latter salutes a “talented, efficient and human” activist. An important step for Jordan Bardella, who will be able to work more closely with the head of the far-right training, Marine Le Pen, then in the midst of the presidential campaign. Another level climbed within the FN: he became, in September 2017 and the departure of Florian Philippot, one of the spokespersons. A “title” which allows him to gain visibility, and not only among the voters of Marine Le Pen.
In political parties, however well established, such as the RN, we also give the chance to young people who come from working-class backgrounds.
Louis aliot
He is very popular within the party. “His youth embodies renewal,” argues another executive, and recalls that the party, which has since become National Rally (RN) has always promoted its young activists, including the former deputy Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. Critics are rare, except for one executive who mentions his lack of interest in European issues.
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At 23, he was appointed head of the RN list in the 2019 European elections in France. This choice was, for the deputy RN Louis Aliot, “to show that, in political parties yet well established like the RN, we also give the chance to young people who come from working-class backgrounds”. He will then lead the RN to victory at the Europeans.
Critics are rare, except for one executive who mentions his lack of interest in European issues. All, too, emphasize his oratory skills, his sense of rhetoric, even if he does not have the reputation of being a hard worker.
A career without stories
His profile of ordinary and ordinary person from a modest background evokes an openness, to be qualified certainly, which speaks to a larger public unlike other party officials who rather symbolize the older generation of the National Front. Besides being a pure “product of the house”, Jordan Bardella also has the advantage of not having been splashed by business, unlike other officials indicted in the case of fictitious jobs in the European Parliament.
Much appreciated by activists, the 25-year-old was particularly applauded Saturday at the RN congress in Perpignan. They seem not to have held it against him for the defeat in the regional last week. Leader of the National Rally in Ile-de-France, he had collected 10.8% of the vote in the second round (-3 points compared to the first round).
During his speech at the party congress in Perpignan on Saturday, Bardella thus underlined: “Abstention is the refuge of despair” but “nothing is lost and there is still a way”. : “We have no right to doubt”, he added, while the failure of the regional has generated criticism within and on the periphery of the party on its functioning, its local establishment, or its ” standardization “. The new first vice-president of the RN criticized in this regard the “stashed”, the “deserters” who “shoot in the back of the front line fighters”.
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During the campaign for regional elections, he had already chaired a meeting without Marine Le Pen in Seine-et-Marne, which looked very much like a dress rehearsal for a party leader, where he called for the delinquents to be “relocated to their homes” by irregular situation. The handover will take place at the RN’s political re-entry scheduled for September. Party activists voted on Saturday for a change of statutes which allows this interim presidency “for 12 months”.
Jordan Bardella is also very close to the president of the party and, in a way, the leadership of the party remains a bit in the family: the new first vice-president of the RN is in a relationship with Nolwenn Olivier, daughter of Marine- Caroline Le Pen (sister of Marine) and Philippe Olivier (special advisor to the head of the RN), granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
And after ? The ambitions and the future of the new vice-president of the party remain unclear. There is no doubt that the results of the presidential election of his now one and only superior, Marine Le Pen, will allow him to see more clearly.
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