Who is Jordan Bardella? The 28 yr old who could soon be French PM
Jordan Bardella’s journey from gamer to potential prime minister has stunned the world. Here’s why he’s causing a frenzy after making huge gains in the French polls.
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French President Emmanuel Macron and his allies were on Monday beginning a week of intense campaigning ahead of the second round of legislative elections to prevent the far right in a historic first from taking an absolute majority and control of government.
The far-right National Rally (RN) party of Marine Le Pen won a resounding victory in the first round of the polls Sunday, with Macron’s centrists trailing in third behind a left-wing coalition.
But the key suspense ahead of the second round on July 7 was whether the RN would win an absolute majority in the new National Assembly, as well as the largest number of seats.
That would enable the party of far-right figurehead Le Pen to be certain of taking power and for her protege Jordan Bardella, 28, to become prime minister.
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who is likely to be forced to resign after the second round, warned that the far right was now at the “gates of power”.
The RN should not get a “single vote” in the second round, he said.
So who is Jordan Bardell and what is behind his shock rise to power?
Among the Boomers of the Palais Bourbon, National Rally leader Jordan Bardella was mocked with the derisive sobriquet, Bard est pas là: “Bard is not here”.
While caricatured for his absentee rate as a member of the European parliament, the 28-year-old was busy amassing 1.7 million TikTok followers on his way to becoming the front runner to be the next Prime Minister of France.
The Zoomer’s meteoric rise from playing Call of Duty video games on YouTube, to the cusp of the premiership, has the world wondering how Bard est pas là seemingly came from nowhere to, potentially, the second highest office behind President Emmanuel Macron.
He’s been waved away as inexperienced. Branded “far right”. And smeared as “racist”. But the barrage of attacks from political opponents failed to prevent the groundswell of support for Bardella, the National Rally, and their message that “France is disappearing”.
The old guard in Paris either overlooked, or underestimated, the changing face of the political landscape in France and Europe; where the 2000s-era dance hit L’amour Toujours – aka Foreigners Out – has gone viral amid widespread backlash to years of unfettered immigration.
The National Rally, a moderating rebrand of Marine Le Pen’s National Front, more than doubled the vote of Macron’s Renaissance Party at the European Union elections earlier this month, prompting the president to call a snap election, held over two rounds on June 30 and July 7.
Macron is gambling that the support for the National Rally won’t translate from Europe to the local polls. He called it an “act of trust” in the French public to defend liberalism.
Le Pen, who gave up leadership of the National Rally so she could challenge Macron as president in 2027, is betting her protégé has tapped into a French electorate increasingly disenfranchised by Euro-centric politics of open borders.
Le Pen handed Bardella the presidency of the National Rally leadership in 2022, just three years after he was elected to the European parliament in 2019.
In the 2024 European elections that triggered France’s political upheaval, about a third of voters aged between 19 and 34 cast a ballot for Bardella compared with 5 per cent for Macron’s Renaissance Party.
The appeal of the self-proclaimed “candidate of truth” stems from the patriotic populist policies that prioritise France and French citizens over international affairs and foreign nationals.
He promises to cut taxes on fuel, gas and electricity, as well as for companies that increase their low- and medium-paid employees’ wages by up to 10 per cent. And he would cancel Macron’s controversial raising of the retirement age.
Dual citizens would be barred from holding sensitive positions in the state. His first week in power would tighten immigration laws to expel “Islamist foreigners”.
“He is a chameleon. He adapts perfectly to the environment around him,” Pierre-Stephane Fort, author of the newly-released biography The Hidden Side of Jordan Bardella, told the BBC in France. ”And he is a chronic opportunist. There is no ideology there. He’s pure strategy. He senses where the wind is blowing, and gets in there early.”
Bardella was 16 when he joined the National Front in 2012, when Le Pen finished third in her failed bid for the presidency. She rebranded the party to the National Rally in 2018 to remove the association with her controversial father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Born to Italian immigrant families with roots further back to Algeria, Bardella grew up in the social housing of Seine-Saint-Denis, a multiethnic suburb of Paris.
His parents split when he was just one year old. While he claimed to have grown up amid the violence of Paris’s depressed social housing, his father paid for him to attend a private Catholic school.
He dropped out of studying geography at Sorbonne University to pursue a career in politics, an interest he picked up at the age of 16 while interning at a local police station.
“He is the real thing. I think that kind of authenticity is the sort of thing people like Donald Trump try to ape,” Dr Joseph Downing, a senior lecturer at Aston University in the UK, who specialises in French politics, said.
“He is not a divisive figure, [and] he has not come through the established pathway either. I think that is something that impresses a lot upon both young and old French people.”
Ballard’s soft-spoken manner, impeccable neatness, and youthful good looks, against the backdrop of his lift-up-from-the-boot-straps origin story, quickly propelled him to the Instagram-friendly face of the party as spokesman.
Cynical observers claimed he was elevated as the party’s multicultural shield to long-running allegations of bigotry.
“Bardella-mania”, as it’s been dubbed, has taken over TikTok, where commenters say he’s “not only handsome, but he is intelligent too!”
“Mr Bardella, I’m 17 years old and you give me hope that you can change things for our country. I used to be more of a leftist and I think I want to put my trust in you,” says a teen on a June 19 TikTok post.
French polls suggest the National Rally could win about a third of the vote in the first round of voting on June 30. A second round of voting is scheduled for July 7 if no candidate obtains a 50 per cent majority of the National Assembly’s 577 seats.
If the National Rally wins an absolute majority, a “cohabitation” government would form with President Macron until at least the 2027 elections.
The last cohabitation government in France dates back almost 27 years, when President Jacques Chirac lost seats in the 1997 election and was forced to share power with Prime Minister Lionel Jospin until 2002.
Bardella was just one year old at the time. His parents had just gotten divorced and he was being raised by a single mother in the depilated council estates of forgotten France. He’s quick to make sure no one forgets it.
“Like many families who live in the neighbourhood, I was confronted with violence at an early age and saw how my mum had difficulty making ends meet,” he said in a France 2 television interview. “That is where I forged my first political convictions.”
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Originally published as Who is Jordan Bardella? The 28 yr old who could soon be French PM
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