How Jordan Bardella Lost the Throne of the French Far Right to His Mentor Marine Le Pen

Last December, the president of France’s far-right National Rally party, Jordan Bardella, was a guest on Quelle Époque! It’s a Gallic blend of The Graham Norton Show and Real Time with Bill Maher, a Saturday night infotainment program that brings together all kinds of celebrities for panels and games. One of the show’s staple segments is The Grand Photo-Call, where the guest is shown portraits of prominent personalities and comes up with a question inspired by each image. When Bardella took his turn, he was presented with a picture of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

“Where does he get all that energy?” Bardella asked.

A few photos later: Donald Trump. Bardella’s slight hesitation was followed by almost exactly the same response.

“Where does he get all that energy, too?”

The other guests on set could not contain their laughter: Bardella’s caution bordered on cowardice. His party may be France’s MAGA analog, but Trump himself is impressively unpopular with the French public. The National Rally’s then 30-year-old prodigy wanted it both ways, and this calculating approach took a different shape earlier in the segment. He’d been shown a portrait of Marine Le Pen, his mentor and the longtime leader of his party, and he’d adopted a solemn tone.

“I wouldn’t ask a question,” he said. “I’d simply say thank you.”

The show’s presenter, Léa Salamé, mischievously completed his thought: “…for stepping aside for me.”

Le Pen had been convicted more than eight months earlier of misappropriation of public funds and complicity in similar offenses by other National Rally members serving in the European Parliament. When Bardella appeared on Quelle Époque!, with his party’s standard-bearer sent to the sidelines, it was considered inevitable that he would be the National Rally’s next presidential candidate—and, in all likelihood, the next president of France.

Today, everything is different. The election won’t take place until April, but Bardella already knows he will not be president. Not this time at least. The most serious controversy of his career erupted last month with the publication of antisemitic messages that French news outlet Mediapart alleges he authored more than a decade ago as a young member of the National Rally (RN). The texts, which Vanity Fair has not independently verified, include suggestions that “all banks are owned by Jews” and that Jews seek to dominate and steal from non-Jews. Bardella denies writing the messages as a 17-year-old and has threatened legal action against the outlet, but the new allegations jeopardize all the work his mentor has done to transform the National Rally’s brand. Though that’s not exactly why Bardella is losing his grip on the throne.

This past July, Le Pen announced that she would resume her candidacy for president after an appeals court reduced her electoral ban. Bardella’s face at the campaign kickoff the following day seemed to reveal his disillusionment. Officially, he said he felt “neither relief nor disappointment.” (“The relationship with Marine Le Pen remains exactly the same,” Victor Chabert, Bardella’s press adviser, told Vanity Fair. “They are campaigning together.”) But how many supporters whispered to him that he would be a far better candidate than Marine Le Pen, who has already lost three elections? According to the newspaper Libération, one of Bardella’s advisers at the time, François Durvye, “half seriously” pushed him to make a move: “You have to go before the press outside and announce your candidacy.”

He didn’t. Bardella briefly appeared with Le Pen on the campaign trail this summer and then went on vacation with his new partner, Princess Maria Carolina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, whose regal persona doesn't exactly align with his party's populist rhetoric slamming the elite. In late August, the 23-year-old royal influencer posted a selfie from their trip to Sardinia. They were all smiles as Bardella rested his head on her shoulder.

Days later, he returned to the political stage for an event in Châlons-en-Champagne, promising to stand by Le Pen during the campaign. It brought to mind Marine’s father Jean-Marie, the father of the modern French far right, when he played on the word dauphin, which can mean either a dolphin or a crown prince: “The fate of dauphins is sometimes to run aground.”

“Marine Le Pen radiates,” Bardella writes in his 2024 autobiography, Ce Que Je Cherche (What I’m Looking For). It was June 2016, and he’d been invited with around 15 other young party officials and activists to a pizzeria in Nanterre, northwest of Paris. He was seated next to his party’s leader, and she asked about his campaign in Seine-Saint-Denis, a working-class département outside the capital. Then she added: “Would you like to work for me?”

“Le ciel me tombe sur la tête,” Bardella gushes on the page—“the sky fell in on me”—though perhaps he means to convey something more divinely inspired. It was his introduction to the first family of the French far right.

In 1972, Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen cofounded the National Front—rebranded in 2018 as the National Rally—alongside former French collaborators with the Nazi regime. Pierre Bousquet, a cofounder, was a former member of the Waffen-SS Charlemagne unit. Jean-Marie could often be found ranting on television with a patch over his left eye, reportedly the result of an accident in 1965, and he dismissed the gas chambers as a “minor detail” in the history of World War II. When he reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002, the result sent shockwaves through the political landscape before he was crushed by Jacques Chirac. The lesson then was clear: While Jean-Marie could reach the second round, he couldn’t win the presidency.

The youngest of his three daughters, Marine, took over the family business in 2011 and accelerated the National Front’s so-called dédiabolisation (“de-demonization”) strategy: soften the rhetoric, toss out the overly controversial figures, and distance the party from its antisemitic past. The platform would remain extreme on issues of immigration and French identity, but the packaging had to be subtler. Le Pen began to stigmatize immigration by warning that its objective might be the “outright replacement of the French population,” skirting the hateful slogans to claim instead that the far right was working to save a civilization under threat.

It was this new version of the National Front that Bardella joined in 2012. He had yet to turn 17, and he spent three weeks convincing his Italian-born mother, Luisa, to give him the parental authorization that he legally needed. He was the only child of parents who separated before he turned two, and he lived mostly with Luisa in a housing project in Saint-Denis. In his teenage bedroom, young Bardella played Call of Duty and ran a YouTube channel with the username MrJordan9320. In the neighborhood outside his window, he has said there was drug dealing, trafficking, and gang-related settling of scores. He would later describe Saint-Denis to Le Monde as a city that transformed into “a breeding ground for Islamism, rife with crime and drug trafficking.”

It was also around this time that, according to the report published last month by Mediapart, Bardella allegedly sent a number of antisemitic messages. He denied authoring the messages before Mediapart followed up with screenshots of the alleged exchanges, at which point Bardella took to X to blast the “so-called ‘evidence’” as “crude fabrications, obscure and easily manipulated screenshots,” adding that he’d instructed his lawyer to file a complaint for forgery and use of forged documents. (He’d already filed a defamation complaint.) Earlier this month, Mediapart published further evidence backing its allegations, including testimony from four people who said Bardella controlled the account in question at the time. Bardella continues to deny writing the messages.

None of that was in the picture in 2012, when Bardella first joined the National Front, and the party welcomed him with open arms. A kid from the banlieue who was fully committed to the cause wasn’t exactly common, and young Bardella cut a sharp figure with his neatly swept-back hair and tailored suits. At 19, he became the youngest departmental official in the party’s history. By 22, he was made a national spokesperson for the party. At 23, he was the party’s marquee candidate for the EU parliamentary elections. And that was just the beginning.

In far-right circles, Bardella gets around. He was reported to be in a relationship with Kerridwen Chatillon, the daughter of Frédéric Chatillon, a longtime associate of Marine Le Pen. Then there was the romance with Nolwenn Olivier, the daughter of Philippe Olivier and Marie-Caroline Le Pen, Marine’s older sister. All the while, the young activist seemed to move closer to the center of power, and he became a frequent guest at Montretout, Saint-Cloud, where the Le Pens hold a vast family estate in the hills west of Paris. Behind the gate, surrounded by century-old trees and all kinds of outbuildings, their 19th-century manor house has for decades hosted the clan’s Sunday lunches, quarrels, and reconciliations.

As he worked his way into the inner sanctum, Bardella was also training as a television debater. A journalist turned media coach named Pascal Humeau worked with him relentlessly on his posture, eye contact, and use of silent pauses. Bardella had been an “empty shell,” Humeau recalled in a 2024 interview with Complément d’Enquête, but by the time he was done, even Bardella’s enemies might consider him “likable, even for a fascist.” Now he speaks rapidly, stays calm when his opponent loses their temper, and always returns to simple imagery.

Immigration? “We need to cut the flow.” The European border agency, Frontex? “A reception desk for migrants.”

During a debate on BFM TV in May 2019, Nathalie Loiseau—the lead candidate for French president Emmanuel Macron’s party in the upcoming European Parliament elections—thought she could dismiss Bardella like an ill-prepared student. She cast him as an apprentice, woefully inexperienced, but he turned her condescension around to humiliate her: “No one has ever heard of you.”

Eleven days later, the National Rally won 23% of the vote in France’s election for the European Parliament, outperforming Macron’s centrist slate. At 23 years old, Bardella had just beaten the president’s party. “The French people have dealt a clear rebuke and a lesson in humility to the president of the republic,” he said that night. The more he was criticized for his lack of experience, the more Bardella embodied the idea of a fresh start. The more people brought up the National Front’s past, the more Bardella seemed to prove that the party had changed.

At the Maison de la Mutualité in Paris three years later, he was crowned prince as party activists staged a carefully orchestrated coronation. Bardella’s opponent, Louis Aliot—Marine Le Pen’s former domestic partner—accepted the role of candidate doomed to lose. (Without an internal contest, Aliot explained later, Le Pen’s successor would have lacked legitimacy.) Bardella won nearly 85% of the vote to Aliot’s 15%, and at 27 years old, he became the first National Rally president not named Le Pen.

So what, exactly, would the Bardella era look like?

Vladimir Putin had warmly received Marine Le Pen at the Kremlin in 2017, the National Rally had secured a loan from a Russian bank in 2014—now reportedly repaid—and several of the party’s leading figures had long echoed the Kremlin’s positions on major European issues. But in February 2023, Bardella suggested to the newspaper L’Opinion that there had been a “collective naïveté” regarding Putin’s ambitions and said there would be no resolution to the conflict without the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. He even went so far as to share the article on Twitter, but of the 88 RN deputies at the time, Le Monde reports, only four of them shared his interview.

Bardella has also signaled a new openness on women’s rights, but in The Great Replacer: The Hidden Face of Jordan Bardella, journalist Pierre-Stéphane Fort argues his voting record has failed to match the rhetoric. Fort reports that Bardella opposed a November 2021 resolution reiterating the European Parliament’s condemnation of Poland’s de facto abortion ban instituted the year before, and in March 2023, Bardella abstained on EU legislation aimed at strengthening the principle of equal pay for equal work between women and men.

And beyond the votes, there was the Twitter. Fort found RepNat du Gaito, an account that three sources who spoke with him on condition of anonymity alleged was Bardella’s. Active between 2015 and 2017, the account reportedly posted racist and homophobic messages and celebrated Jean-Marie Le Pen. When confronted about the account in mid-January 2024, Bardella was quick to deny it belonged to him: “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have only one Twitter account.”

The allegations did not appear to slow Bardella down. Instead, they seemed to reinforce his supporters’ belief that there are people out there determined to bring him down, and in June 2024 his party romped to 31% of the vote in the European elections, more than double that of the Macron camp. The same evening, Macron dissolved France’s National Assembly, triggering snap elections. Suddenly, everything moved very quickly.

That same month, the National Rally triumphed in the first round of the legislative elections, and an absolute majority in the French parliament seemed within reach. Bardella would become prime minister. He was so confident of this that he announced he would refuse the post if his party didn’t win that outright majority. Writing in Ce Que Je Cherche, Bardella recalls thinking: “In a few hours, at the age of 28, I might become prime minister.”

But the fast and furious campaign laid bare what the party’s facelift had been hiding. When it came time to field nearly 500 candidates in various races, the party was seemingly forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel. One National Rally candidate had to withdraw after a photo surfaced of her wearing what appeared to be a Luftwaffe cap emblazoned with a swastika. Another was dropped by the party after an old tweet was discovered in which he wrote, “Gas brought justice to the victims of the Shoah,” referencing the Holocaust. (The candidate, Joseph Martin, denied the post was antisemitic and said it had been misinterpreted. Days later, following a meeting of the party’s disciplinary committee, he was reinstated.) Bardella called these candidates “black sheep,” as if he were discovering them for the first time, just as the French public were.

In the end, the National Rally and its allies finished in third place. The next day, Bardella spoke to reporters: “Victory has been postponed.”

In March 2025, Marine Le Pen was found guilty of misappropriation of public funds for her role in a broader scheme that, the court found, used approximately 2.9 million euros from European Parliament funds to pay parliamentary assistants who were actually engaged in work on behalf of her party. (Le Pen denied any wrongdoing and appealed the verdict.) The National Rally had long denounced a predatory Europe, but when Brussels could be used to siphon funds, it suddenly seemed to possess some redeeming qualities. The conviction carried a five-year ban on running for public office, effective immediately, and the sentence appeared to rule Le Pen out of running in the 2027 presidential election. At that moment, all of France imagined that Bardella would soon be moving into the Élysée Palace.

The prospective candidate began to test out a new “Bardellism.” Under Le Pen, the RN had combined a radical immigration policy with a decidedly statist economic agenda: an earlier retirement age, generous social protections, state intervention, and skepticism toward globalization. Bardella, on the other hand, tried appealing to entrepreneurs with promises of lower taxes, fewer regulations, and reduced public spending. It was a pro-business, Reagan-esque conservatism grafted onto the old National Front’s obsession with immigration. When reporters questioned Bardella about the shift, he was defiant—and a bit dismissive of his mentor’s approach: “I’m not left wing.”

To gain credibility with business leaders, he began to rely more on François Durvye, a former investment executive who provided an entrée. Bardella reportedly pursued a series of meetings with Alexandre Arnault, son of LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard; financier Édouard Carmignac; Guillaume Faury, the CEO of Airbus; and Patrick Martin, the president of Medef, France’s leading employers organization. The doors of the CAC 40—France’s benchmark index of 40 major publicly traded companies—were beginning to crack open. The reason was simple, according to Le Monde: Some business leaders viewed Bardella as “more malleable” than Le Pen.

This rise in status was mirrored in Bardella’s private life. In January 2026, Bardella was filmed leaving the Grand Palais in Paris in the same car as a tall then 22-year-old blonde. Princess Maria Carolina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies holds the courtesy titles of Duchess of Calabria and Palermo, she’s a distant descendant of Louis XIV, and she belongs to a branch of the family that claims the defunct throne of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. On Instagram, where she has more than 259,000 followers, the princess shares photos from galas and social events she’s attended alongside her dresses, her travels, Formula 1 Grand Prix races, and her 2018 visit to Mar-a-Lago. Three months later, Paris Match published “paparazzi” photos of the couple in Corsica that Le Monde later suggested could’ve been staged. Paris Match celebrated the union between a “politician [who rose] from the people” and a “princess from the highest ranks of the nobility.”

“We made the decision to stop hiding,” Bardella later explained in an April interview with Léa Salamé.

A few months later, he was seen in Monaco with Maria Carolina in a VIP box at the Formula 1 Grand Prix. At the time, France was reeling from the killing of Lyhanna Rameau Bernard, an 11-year-old who had disappeared and was later found dead in a grain silo. That same day in Fleurance, a commune in southern France, around 6,000 people took part in a silent march in her memory. A week after, he was asked on BFM TV about the contrast between the memorial march and his presence in the principality of Monaco and responded: “Is that a serious question?” He noted that Lyhanna’s family had asked politicians not to attend, but only after adding: “There are silent marches every day.”

Within the National Rally, concerns were beginning to mount: Was Bardella losing touch amid his new taste for the high life? Did Le Pen worry that her protégé had become a princeling, a political liability, and did that play a role in her decision to jump back in the race? Or is she just desperate to be president?

Now Le Pen seems to be promising an American-style ticket: She’ll be president and Bardella will be her prime minister. But Americans elect a president and vice president in the same election, while in France the president is elected directly by voters and then he (or perhaps soon she) appoints a prime minister based in part on the results of separate legislative elections. Bardella will have to wait for the results, and for Le Pen to keep her word. An RN campaign poster already leaves room for doubt about Le Pen’s commitment to Bardella: She appears on it alone, with the slogan “For France, a Renaissance,” her arms outstretched above French flags like a risen Christ.

“It’s a joint campaign, and they will continue to work as a team,” Chabert, Bardella’s press adviser, adds in his response to Vanity Fair. “There has been no change in their respective roles. We will not allow attempts to destabilize the presidential campaign to affect us. In fact, they are holding a joint press conference [last week] to present the alternative budget.”