Jordan Bardella, the ‘ideal son-in-law’ who could bring extremists to power in France | European Elections 2024 | News

Jordan Bardella (Drancy, 28 years old), winner of Sunday’s European elections in France and aspiring to become prime minister after this summer’s legislative elections, has been called a “cyborg” for his discipline and method. A machine for conquering power.

He is also known as the “ideal son-in-law”, the far-right leader who doesn’t seem far-right. He is neither lazy nor has an accent…

Jordan Bardella (Drancy, 28 years old), winner of Sunday’s European elections in France and aspiring to become prime minister after this summer’s legislative elections, has been called a “cyborg” for his discipline and method. A machine for conquering power.

He is also known as the “ideal son-in-law”, the far-right leader who doesn’t seem far-right. He is neither feeble, nor does he pronounce one word thicker than another, nor does he say anything that would easily lead his opponents to label him undemocratic, xenophobic, and even downright racist.

The title of the recently published investigative journalism book about him, Great replacementone of two Great replacementSays something else about him. Replacement To her mentor Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally (RN) and daughter of veteran ultra leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, if one day she fails. Or if he—kinder, less polarizing, without the last name that demeans him—eventually takes her place. ReplacementAlso because it supports one of the tenets of the contemporary far right: that Great replacementWhich argues that Muslim and African immigrants threaten to replace native European populations.

“I don’t use this term, because it’s a very intellectual concept,” Bardella told EL PAIS a few years ago. And he specified that, unlike some promoters of this theory, he did not believe that what it describes was a conspiracy. But he added: “It points to a reality: where I grew up there are French people who no longer recognize the country where they grew up, including French people of immigrant origin.”

There is no successful politician who does not have a more or less embellished story that allows him to tell voters a story that serves to convey ideas. Jordan Bardella’s story begins in the multicultural and working-class suburbs of Paris, Seine-Saint-Denis, France’s poorest province, with the most immigrants and the youngest population. His parents, of Italian origin, are divorced. He lives with his mother in an apartment block where drug trafficking is flourishing and Islamism is rampant. They have difficulty making ends meet. Here is a politician – a politician of the nationalist right, in favor of the most restrictive laws regarding law and order and immigration – who can say, and does say: “I know what I’m talking about.”

Today Bardella lives not far from Seine-Saint-Denis, in the affluent west of Paris. And today we know – I explained it recently Le Monde– That his childhood was oscillating between two social classes: that of his mother and that of his father, who lived in this wealthy part of the Paris region, and who took him on trips to Miami or gave him a car when he turned 18. Intelligent.

But the founding myth persists. Now perhaps more than ever. Following the landslide victory of the list he led in the European elections, and after President Emmanuel Macron called an early legislative election in two rounds on June 30 and July 7, Bardella was chosen as the head of government if the RN won the National Assembly.

Bardella, prime minister? It would be the culmination of a brilliant career. That of a boy who gave up university studies to climb the RN. The MEP is 23, although his legislative balance is meager. At 27, the party president and Le Pen’s right hand. And the face of the process by which a party on the margins of democracy a few years ago – the National Front, the predecessor of the RN, founded by collaborators of Nazi Germany – is today a central player in France.

Bardella likes it, and is not intimidated. An empty shell with little technical preparation and little mastery of the issues in the debate? The Europeans have shown that this was not a problem. A mask image? Pierre-Stephane Fort, author of Great replacementis convinced that this is the case: “My deep feeling,” he writes, “is that, behind the attractive mask of youth, the smoke screen of marketing, ideas have not changed.”