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Jordan Bardella (French:[ʒɔʁdanbaʁdɛla]; born 13 September 1995) is a French politician who has been the president of the National Rally (RN) since 2022, previously serving as acting president from September 2021 to November 2022 and as vice-president from 2019 to 2022. Bardella has also served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since 2019, when he was the lead candidate for the RN in the European Parliament election, and has been a regional councillor of Île-de-France since 2015.
Before becoming acting president of the RN, Bardella served as vice-president from 2019 to 2021 and the party's spokesman from 2017 to 2019. From 2018 to 2021, he was also president of its youth wing, the Génération Nation (GN), later renamed Rassemblement National de la Jeunesse (RNJ).
Biography
Early life and education
Jordan Bardella was born on 13 September 1995 in Drancy, Seine-Saint-Denis as the only child in a family of Catalan origin.[1][2] The maternal side of his family immigrated to France from Turin in the 1960s. His paternal grandmother, a native of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, is also partly of immigrant origin, with an Algerian father who came to France in the 1930s in Villeurbanne working as a labourer in the construction industry.[3] His paternal grandfather later converted to Islam and married a Moroccan woman, settling in the Bourgogne district of Casablanca.[4] His father and mother split when Bardella was one year old.[5][6]
Bardella grew up in a local council tower block in Drancy, and would later claim to represent "modest origins and the social fibre" in politics.[7][8][9] His father was a business owner, living in the wealthier suburb of Montmorency, and Bardella would spend weekends and Wednesdays there.[10] He likes to leave his father out, when he focuses on the social difficulties he had to face growing up in France's poorest department, a social hotspot with the highest proportion of immigrants, even though he has his own immigration history.[11] While concentrating on it, he presents himself as that "underdog" who has managed to fully integrate, leave the banlieue and raise his social status.[11]
After receiving a high school diploma with distinction in economics and social sciences at the private lycée Jean-Baptiste-de-La-Salle,[12] he studied geography at Paris-Sorbonne University but dropped out to focus on politics.[13][14]
Beginnings in the National Front (2012–2017)
In 2012, Bardella became a member of the National Front (FN) at the age of 16,[12] saying that he joined "more for Marine Le Pen than for the National Front".[15][16] He then became the FN department secretary of Seine-Saint-Denis in 2014 at the age of 19, making him the party's youngest ever departmental official.[17] From 16 February to 30 June 2015, Bardella worked as parliamentary assistant to FN Member of the European Parliament Jean-François Jalkh.[18] It was during this period that political observers began to consider him a leading figure on issues in the French banlieues within the FN.[19]
Bardella ran in the 2015 departmental elections to represent the commune of Tremblay-en-France. He and his fellow candidate, Christine Prus, lost in the second round with 41% of the vote.[20] In the 2015 regional elections the same year, he was a candidate at the head of the FN list in Seine-Saint-Denis and was elected to the regional council of Île-de-France.[21]
In January 2016, Bardella launched the organization Banlieues Patriotes. The group sought to "break with the politics of the city and reach out to voters in the forgotten territories of the Republic."[22] He then became part of Marine Le Pen's campaign team in the 2017 presidential election, in which she finished second.[23] Bardella was himself a candidate for Seine-Saint-Denis's 12th constituency in the legislative elections the same year, where he was eliminated in the first round with 15% of the vote.[24][25]
Vice-President of the National Rally and Member of the European Parliament (2017–2021)
After the defeat of the FN in the 2017 presidential election and the resignation of vice-president Florian Philippot, Bardella was appointed party spokesman alongside Sébastien Chenu and Julien Sanchez.[26][27][28] The following year, Le Pen also appointed him as president of the Front National de la Jeunesse (FNJ), which later became Génération Nation (GN).
Bardella was named second vice-president of the RN on 16 June 2019, and first vice-president in 2021.[37] He headed the RN list in the 2021 regional elections in Île-de-France, receiving 13.8% of the vote in the first round and 10.8% in the second. By contrast, the right-wing list led by Valérie Pécresse won with 46% of the vote.[38][39] Journalist Richard Werly attributed the defeat to Bardella's "inability to find a convincing regional angle despite his familial connections [to the region]" and "lack of depth in a university-educated region, having abandoned his post-secondary studies."[40]
President of the National Rally (2022–present)
Bardella in the European Parliament in 2022
Bardella became acting president of the National Rally after Marine Le Pen resigned to launch her presidential campaign in the 2022 French presidential election.[41] Bardella was elected president of the National Rally on 5 November 2022, beating Louis Aliot by 85% to 15% of party members who voted.[42][43]
Political positions
During his campaign in the 2019 European elections, Bardella stated that the two political priorities of his generation are the migrant crisis and the environmental crisis, saying that "if humans are responsible for what seems to be climate change, our economic model depends on it." He also opposed French entry into new free trade treaties.[44] Bardella additionally criticized the "punitive environmentalism" of the Macron government, which he argued was "criminalizing French people."[45] In May 2019, Bardella evoked but did not name the Great Replacement conspiracy theory during a televised debate.[46]
The party is still lagging behind on climate issues. But even in Franceclimate change is no longer a niche issue but is affecting more and more people. Jordan Bardella stressed that the environmental protection should not be left to the political left, but resorted to patriotism, confirming that it meant the protection of the people and their environment.[49] With that statement he associates the climate crisis with the anti-immigrant stance of the RN, since he agrees with the left-wing party that the climate crisis will lead to an unstoppable global mass refugee crisis. On the issue of migration, Bardella and the RN base their positions on the pursuit of political and ideological divisions, which must be exploited. They want to take advantage of the gap between the urban and rural or peripheral spaces and attitudes.[50]
Positions on social and societal issues
Bardella has expressed personal opposition to same-sex marriage on the grounds that it will open the door to surrogacy or medically assisted reproduction.[51] Nevertheless, he has also accepted that "for the majority of France, marriage for all is now a given" and stated his support for a citizens' initiative referendum on the topic in 2019. He has also stated he will not campaign to abolish same-sex marriage as leader of the National Rally, arguing that the debate on the matter is closed and it is part of French law, and that there are more pressing issues facing the country.[52] Bardella also advocates "cutting social services for people who illegally arrived in France" and legalizing cannabis for medical purposes.[53][54]
Political proximity
According to Le Monde, Bardella can "boast of having woven closer ties" with former Italian Minister for Internal Affairs Matteo Salvini, whom he views as a role model. He is also believed to be close to Marine Le Pen's adviser Frédéric Chatillon, having at one point been in a relationship with his daughter.[55][56] At the same time, Bardella has declared that he is close to Marine Le Pen.[57] In 2021, he posted statements of support for Génération Identitaire, a far-right organization that had been dissolved by the French government for inciting racial hatred and violence, on Facebook. As a result, Facebook removed the posts and suspended certain features of his account.[58]
Personal life
Bardella is in a relationship with Nolwenn Olivier since 2020: she is the daughter of Marie-Caroline Le Pen, Marine's elder sister; this led to allegations of nepotism in favour of Bardella inside the RN party.[59] Before that, he had been in relationships with Kelly Betesh[60] and later with Kerridwen Chatillon, daughter of Frédéric Chatillon.[61]
Guerrino Bardella, Jordan Bardella's paternal grandfather, settled in Morocco (in Casablanca), where he has a 10-year residence permit, and married a Moroccan woman and converted to Islam.[62]
After Ali Rabeh, a Muslim, was re-elected as mayor of Trappes in 2021, Bardella described the city as an "Islamic republic" on the radio station Europe 1. He then announced on 2 February 2022, that he was indicted for this statement, saying "I am disappointed that the French justice system pursues the same goal today as the Islamists, to silence those who denounce real issues and those who oppose the transformation of countless neighbourhoods in France."[64][65]
Suspicions regarding fake employment at the European Parliament
In 2019, Challenges revealed that Jordan Bardella had been a part-time parliamentary assistant of the Member of EU Parliament Jean-François Jalkh during 2015, and that he had been identified by the EU Parliament in 2017 as being part of the assistants linked to "irregular use of the parliamentary assistant compensation".[66][67]Le Canard enchaîné revealed later that he had been similarly suspected by the European Anti-Fraud Office, since 2016.[68]