Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella? Identity crisis grips France’s far right.
To the chagrin of Le Pen’s old guard, it’s Bardella’s more liberal, pro-business vision that may well secure the presidency for the National Rally.
By MARION SOLLETTYin Paris
Illustration by Victoria Cecé for POLITICO
Will the real candidate for France’s far right please stand up?
Tension is brewing at the top of France’s most popular party over whether it will be Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen who leads the National Rally into the all-important 2027 presidential election — and what that means for the party’s vision and identity.
Bardella, the slick 29-year-old president of the party, has generally been viewed as a loyal, unthreatening protégé to Le Pen. She is the heavyweight whom the party base has long seen as most likely to win a race for the Elysée that could remold Europe’s political landscape.
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But something is now shifting in that leadership dynamic. To Le Pen’s chagrin, she could well be out of the running to succeed Emmanuel Macron because of a fraud conviction, just as Bardella takes off in the polls and steers the National Rally toward a new kind of electorate.
While Le Pen is a scourge of liberal elites, who has courted the working class, Bardella is now wooing conservative business leaders who have historically been wary of Le Pen’s National Rally. While the earthy Le Pen is strong in the disillusioned, former industrial towns of the northeast, the polished Bardella is targeting the wealthier south.
The National Rally’s old guard may not feel entirely at ease with Bardella’s more economically liberal approach but it understands the electoral arithmetic. Winning the presidency means winning more than half the vote, and that will mean poaching voters from the center-right Les Républicains. For that task, Bardella is the man.
Of course, for now, Bardella follows Le Pen’s orders — and she coordinates his forays into new voter bases — but she is also far from blind to his increasingly rapid ascent.
The party’s top brass is treading on eggshells as a new reality emerges. Le Pen’s candidacy is up in the air until the appeal for her conviction, most probably in the summer of 2026, and in the meantime pollsters are revealing Bardella is just as credible as a presidential candidate. Officially, the party is pretending it’s business as usual, but it’s not.
The unease about which way the party is going — and who will be the front-runner for the Elysée — is now palpable.
Bardella bids for business
Bardella’s appeal to a new kind of voter was in full evidence at the Freedom Summit, a jamboree in late June intended to galvanize the right ahead of the presidential election.
The event, which gathered anti-tax groups, right-wing figureheads and political activists across the full spectrum of the right, was held under the patronage of the most powerful godfathers of the French hard right, media mogul Vincent Bolloré and tech billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin.
Despite the soporific heat in the Casino de Paris, a grandiose theater in the heart of the capital, the crowd erupted in excitement when Bardella stepped up to make his pitch. They cheered loudly as he slammed EU red tape and — perhaps most significantly — nodded when he hinted at the need for cuts in social spending to put France’s public finances back on track.
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Revealingly, Bardella is keen to play up parallels with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who is seen as having successfully mainstreamed the hard right, while Le Pen is more closely aligned with Meloni’s deputy, Matteo Salvini, an old-school anti-immigration, nationalist firebrand.
At the Freedom Summit, he was lavish in his praise for Meloni’s ability to turn the Italian economy around, while France is rapidly becoming Europe’s economic renegade over its inability to sort out its deficits.
“I’m looking at numbers and I’m looking at Mrs. Meloni’s actions,” Bardella told POLITICO outside the venue. “Italy is the only G7 country with a primary budget surplus in 2024.”
“Giorgia Meloni is the living proof that popular will can prevail in the ballot,” he added.
And that question of who has the magic recipe for success at the ballot box becomes ever more sensitive as 2027 nears.
Le Pen has stood in three presidential elections, edging closer to victory each time, but now faces two major obstacles.
The first is simply the two-round system, which allows mainstream parties to gang up in the run-off and keep her out of power. The second hurdle is an earth-shattering court decision in March that barred her from running over the embezzlement of funds. That ruling is not necessarily final, as an appeal decision will be issued next year.
For the party, Bardella is a solution to both problems: He has no conviction against him, and stands a good chance of winning over enough center-right voters to make it across the 50 percent line in the presidential election. That clearly rankles with Le Pen, as the party elite realize they may finally gain power thanks to her leadership, but without her as the presidential candidate.
Several party heavyweights interviewed for this story were adamant that Le Pen and Bardella are working together harmoniously toward a common goal — clearing her name and propelling her to victory in 2027 — but the reality is now more complex.
Tensions bubble up
In one of the latest examples of a fault line, Bardella in mid-June openly called for Macron to step down. The problem with making such as call is that an early presidential election could come before Le Pen’s appeal, bumping her out of the contest. The move raised eyebrows among some of the National Rally’s most prominent members.
“I discussed it with Marine who didn’t get it … I think he went a bit fast,” said one Le Pen loyalist and National Rally heavyweight, who like multiple other party officials in this story was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Others shrugged it off, or attributed it to a spur-of-the-moment slipup.
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“It is not a slipup. It is what we have been saying for several months,” said a far-right lawmaker close to Bardella. “If there is [an early election] we will be there, even if that’s not our ideal scenario.”
According to him, Le Pen and Bardella spoke both before and after the interview. “It is not a comfortable situation, for either of them. There is a balance to be found,” he added.
Two days after the call for an early election, a carefully choreographed visit to the Paris Air Show, their first joint trip in weeks, was widely interpreted as an attempt by Le Pen to set the record straight.
As she and Bardella were perusing the fighter jets and missiles at Le Bourget, he conspicuously followed her lead, silently nodding in agreement as she answered reporters’ questions and grinning as Le Pen kept referring to him as her “prime minister” — the post she has long eyed for him, should she become president.
The official plan B
In the weeks following the conviction that made Le Pen ineligible to run, the party had to quickly adjust its strategy, from initially saying there was no need for a plan B to saying Bardella was officially the plan B.
The National Rally now faces an awkward campaign with two figureheads. While nobody is openly accusing Bardella of trying to stab her in the back, everyone concedes the situation is prickly. Bardella has to demonstrate he is ready to take over and lead a presidential race, should Le Pen’s appeal fail, but not openly campaign just yet, or risk his mentor’s ire.
Around both leaders, top party officials and longtime companions alike are in an agonizing bind. “Of course it’s complicated from a human point of view,” a member of Le Pen’s inner circle confessed.
The far-right leader herself admits her future is in question.
“When you’re in politics, you have to accept that you can’t always control events,” Le Pen told far-right weekly Valeurs Actuelles. “I’ve accepted the possibility that I won’t be able to run.”
“Of course, the situation isn’t ideal. But what else do you suggest?” she went on. “That I commit suicide before being murdered?”
Le Pen, who denies any wrongdoing, has cast the trial as politically motivated and the verdict as a death penalty.
But as she awaits the firing squad, she is undergoing a drip-drip of water torture, as she watches her heir replace her in polls and voters’ minds alike.
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In early May, her most faithful supporters were outraged to discover that a wide-ranging survey about to be published by polling firm Ifop polled solely Bardella as the National Rally candidate for 2027. Le Pen was included only after two of her top lieutenants intervened.
Although polling this early before an election has to be taken with a pinch of salt, it has escaped no one’s notice in the party that Bardella’s numbers are just as good as Le Pen’s when they’re both polled.
Perhaps even more worryingly for Le Pen, “there are clearly some doubts among her current and potential voters about her being on the starting line in 2027,” said Frédéric Dabi, director general at Ifop.
Show of force
Faced with these buffeting headwinds, Le Pen has been forced to play catch-up.
On June 9, her party held a massive rally with European allies in Mormant-sur-Vernisson, a rural commune 100 kilometers south of Paris, where the National Rally won over 60 percent of the vote in the 2024 European election.
The big idea was to show that Le Pen was still the sort of big hitter who would stand shoulder to shoulder with the big names of the European right.
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Sure enough, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Salvini and Czech ex-Prime Minister Andrej Babiš appeared on stage to sing the praises of Le Pen.
But despite that endorsement, “Jordan” — as they call him — is just as popular with the party’s rank and file.
“I like them both, Marine Le Pen for her experience, Jordan Bardella for his charisma,” said Nicolas Rocard, 36, who is eyeing a spot to run for the party in the city of Niort in next year’s local elections. “Who is the [presidential] candidate? I don’t really mind.”
A stone’s throw away, under the big white tents protecting attendees from the blazing sun, party members also seemed fine with a swap. “Sincerely, I would prefer it to be Marine. Failing that it will be Jordan,” said Christelle Maho, 58, a local councillor for the party in Lanester, Brittany.
Immigration and security remain front and center among the concerns of National Rally voters, but the party is also building support in the middle class and among small business owners thanks to a strong line against tax and regulation, capturing a traditional campaign area from the center right.
“I don’t want my country to be invaded by people who have nothing to do here,” said Régine Gesnouin, 62, a restaurant owner in Agen, who made the seven-hour drive with her husband in their motorhome to be there. “We are working 70-80 hours a week, they are not working, only having kids.”
Gesnouin said she used to vote for the center right under former President Nicolas Sarkozy but now has switched to the National Rally.
Serenading the center right
In fact, economic issues will likely prove decisive for the party in the next presidential race, where it will need to broaden its base and attract the voters it still lacks to pass the 50 percent bar in the runoff, presumably by luring them away from the traditionally liberal, pro-business center right.
For that electorate, Bardella is more palatable than Le Pen, who still bears the stigma of her name and past proposals that durably sunk her economic credibility, including a pledge to exit the eurozone — a step the party no longer advocates.
Bardella’s overtures to the business elite are a break from the way Le Pen has campaigned.
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She bagged formidable gains by focusing on the cost of living and courting voters in disaffected industrial heartlands with a protectionist agenda. Her top lieutenants and some of the party’s most prominent lawmakers in the National Assembly were elected in the northeast of the country, her political fiefdom, where plant closures and a grim economic outlook fueled working class discontent.
The wave of lawmakers elected under Le Pen’s leadership loathes the word “liberal” (in the economic sense) and insists it doesn’t reflect the party’s line.
They have reasons to be worried about Bardella’s direction of travel.
“The ones close to Le Pen are freaking out,” said a prominent centrist politician, whose constituency is in the northeast. “They think they have invested all this time and effort only to have it snatched away from them … They’re the ones who went out and got the left-wing vote, voters who expect protection against job cuts, an increase in the minimum wage and so on.”
Bardella, who led his party’s list in the European election and is now eyeing electoral wins in the south, the former hunting ground of Le Pen’s father and home to wealthier, more liberal-minded voters, has no reservations about embracing a more liberal platform.
Nor do his troops in the European Parliament, although they reject the idea that their boss is freewheeling by going after the new type of voter.
“Today she is much more liberal than [center-right party] Les Républicains,” said Aleksandar Nikolic, a member of the European Parliament and spokesperson for the party.
Asked whether he defined himself as a liberal at the Freedom Summit in June, Bardella ducked the question.
“I don’t think this label is enough to explain the economic issues and stakes,” he said. “Emmanuel Macron presented himself as a pro-business president. Today, we have some of the highest production taxes in Europe.”
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Last year, Bardella vocally opposed raising taxes on capital gains, going against the party’s official position and the bulk of his party’s members of parliament. He has also been touring corporate associations to defend the party’s economic platform and hit back against the idea that the National Rally would be bad for business.
Earlier this month, Bardella scored a meeting he’d long been after — a session with former center-right President Sarkozy, whom he sent a signed copy of his book.
The meeting was publicized by both politicians’ staff and was clearly intended as signal to undecided right-of-center voters. It was a meeting that Sarkozy would never have granted to Le Pen — and one she would never have asked for.
“Courting Sarkozy’s circles is personally not my cup of tea,” said a National Rally parliamentarian who leans more toward Le Pen.
But he conceded the National Rally could not afford to be too squeamish when it came to the electoral calculus to win the presidency. “When one wants to go from 35 to 51 percent, one has to speak to multiple electorates, including former Sarkozy fans,” he said.
Still, although Le Pen loyalists credit Bardella with broadening the party’s appeal, they also fear that overtures to traditional center-right voters might ultimately benefit right-wing rivals inside and outside the party, including Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, from Les Républicains, an immigration hard-liner and staunch conservative who is hunting on the same grounds.
As the National Rally MP quoted above put it: “What I’m wary about with the liberal-conservative kind is that they … might ultimately drop us for someone else.”
Sarah Paillou contributed to this report.
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