Jordan Bardella, the ‘ideal son-in-law’ who can bring the extreme right 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 “the cyborg” for his discipline and method. A machine to conquer power.

He is also known as “the ideal son-in-law”, that far-right leader who does not seem far-right. He is neither lazy, nor does he pronounce one word thicker than another, nor does he say anything that could easily serve his adversaries to label him anti-democratic, xenophobic and even less racist.

The title of a recently published investigative journalistic book about him, The great replacementeither The great replacementsays something more about him. Replacement of his mentor Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally (RN) and daughter of the veteran ultra leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, if one day she fails. Or if he—kinder, less polarizing, without that last name that weighs her down—he ends up replacing her. Replacementalso, because it subscribes to one of the precepts of the contemporary extreme right: that of great replacementwhich argues that Muslim and African immigrants threaten to replace the native European population.

“I don’t use this term, because it is a very intellectual concept,” Bardella told EL PAÍS a few years ago. And he specified that he, unlike some of the promoters of this theory, did not believe that what it supposedly described was a conspiracy. But he added: “It points out 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 without a more or less embellished story that allows voters to be told a story that serves to convey ideas. Jordan Bardella’s story begins in the multicultural and working-class suburbs of Paris, in Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest province in France, the one with the most immigrants and the youngest. His parents, of Italian origin, are divorced. He lives with his mother in apartment blocks where drug trafficking thrives and Islamism is rampant. They have difficulty making ends meet. Here is a politician – a politician from the nationalist right, in favor of law and order and the most restrictive laws regarding immigration – who can say, and says: “I know what I’m talking about.”

Today Bardella resides 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 a swing 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 when he turned 18 gave him a car Smart.

But the founding myth still stands. Now perhaps more than ever. After the resounding victory of the list that he led in the European elections, and after President Emmanuel Macron called early legislative elections in two rounds on June 30 and July 7, Bardella is chosen to occupy the head of the Government if the RN prevails in the National Assembly.

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

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

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