Jordan Bardella

He has been president of the National Rally, a party reference works place on the far right, since 2022, and a Member of the European Parliament since 2019, chairing the Patriots for Europe group. He is named among the contenders for the 2027 French presidential election.

Career

Bardella joined the National Front in 2012 at age 16 and became its youngest department secretary, for Seine-Saint-Denis, in 2014. He sat as a regional councillor for Île-de-France from 2015 to 2021, served as party spokesman from 2017 to 2019 and led the youth wing Génération Nation from 2018 to 2021. Elected to the European Parliament in 2019, he was vice-president of the party from 2019 to 2022, acting president from 2021 and president since November 2022. Since July 2024 he has chaired the Patriots for Europe group.

Positions

Wikipedia describes Bardella as backing tax cuts for businesses, work conditions for welfare payments and sharply lower immigration, and notes his opposition to aid for Ukraine in the European Parliament. The Irish Times describes his role as the party's normalisation strategy: softer rhetoric with core positions kept, strict immigration limits, hostility toward Islam, opposition to renewable energy policies, and a more economically right-wing stance than Marine Le Pen's, with possible openness to a higher retirement age.

Controversies

In 2024 the anti-corruption group Anticor filed a complaint alleging that falsified documents were produced to substantiate the parliamentary work of several people, Bardella among them, who had worked as assistants of National Front MEPs, according to the Irish Times. The Irish Times reports that he suggests the investigations are politically timed. The Irish Times also reports raids over alleged misuse of European Parliament funds by his political group.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia (English) · Wikipedia (French) · The Irish Times

Photo: Raphael ATTAL @BootEXE, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)