# Jordan Bardella **Born 13 September 1995 in Drancy, Seine-Saint-Denis.** President of the [[National Rally]] since November 2022 and, on current polling, the most popular politician in France. Bardella is what *dédiabolisation* looks like when it is finished. [[Marine Le Pen]] had to detach a party from its founder; Bardella never had anything to detach. He was born twenty-three years after the Front National was created, has no family connection to it, no Algeria, no Vichy, no gas-chamber quotations to explain away — and a biography the party could not have designed better: raised by a single mother in a social-housing block in one of France's poorest departments, with Italian and Franco-Algerian ancestry on his father's side. **The most useful way to read him is as a product rather than a person.** The RN's problem for fifty years was that its history was legible on its leaders' faces. Bardella solves it by having no history at all. ## The Rise Joined the Front National at 16 in 2012. Departmental secretary for Seine-Saint-Denis at 19. Party spokesman from 2017. Led the RN's list in the 2019 European elections at 23 and beat Macron's list. Acting party president from September 2021, elected outright on **5 November 2022** with about 85% against Louis Aliot. In June 2024 he led the RN to **31.4% and 30 seats** in the European elections — the result that prompted [[Emmanuel Macron]] to dissolve the National Assembly. He chairs the **Patriots for Europe** group in the European Parliament, the bloc built with [[Viktor Orbán]] and others in July 2024. ## The Near-Premiership The snap legislative elections of 30 June and 7 July 2024 were fought with Bardella explicitly presented as prime minister in waiting. The RN and allies won the first round on **33.2%**. Between the rounds, more than two hundred candidates from the left and the centre withdrew to consolidate the anti-RN vote, and the party finished third in seats. That fortnight is the single most important data point on the *cordon sanitaire*: **it still worked, it required an extraordinary coordinated act to work, and it delivered a hung parliament that has been ungovernable ever since.** France bought two years by making itself unable to legislate. ## 2027 After Le Pen's March 2025 conviction and immediate ineligibility, Bardella became the presumptive RN candidate and has led every published poll since. Elabe's late-2025 series put him at **35–37.5%** in the first round; a March 2026 poll after the municipals had him at 35% against 20.5% for Édouard Philippe. Then the appeal ruling of **7 July 2026** restored Le Pen's eligibility, and she announced her candidacy the same evening — with Bardella named as her candidate for prime minister. > [!warning] The unresolved question > Bardella polls at or slightly above Le Pen and has never lost anything. He accepted the number-two slot without visible resistance. Whether that holds through a first round in which he is the stronger candidate on paper is the open question of French politics between now and **18 April 2027**, and it is the first real succession test the party has faced that is not settled by a family name. His 2024 memoir *Ce que je cherche* was a commercial success, and his social-media following — particularly on TikTok — is the largest of any French politician by a wide margin. That is not decoration: it is how a party with almost no favourable press coverage reaches voters under thirty-five. ## See Also - [[Marine Le Pen]] · [[Jean-Marie Le Pen]] · [[National Rally]] · [[Éric Zemmour]] - [[Viktor Orbán]] · [[Giorgia Meloni]] · [[National Conservatism]] · [[Global New Right Network]] - [[French History Hub]]