Even at the top of the right-wing National Rally in France, the great replacement of the autochthonous French seems unstoppable. On the hustings for the European elections, its successful young leader, Jordan Bardella, proudly presents himself as “a Frenchman of mixed heritage.”
Day-to-day events rub in Bardella’s message that something is very rotten in the parallel, Islamic societies developing in many suburbs.
The polls predict a landslide for his party Rassemblement National (RN) on June 9th. At around 30 percent of the vote, RN is deemed far ahead of its nearest rival, a relatively unknown member of president Emmanuel Macron’s party. This lady, Valérie Hayer, could hope for 19 percent of the vote at best. If the polls are proved right, the nationalist Right will sweep the board in France, as the RN’s competitor somewhat further to the right, Reconquête, is credited with at least 6 percent of the vote.
About fifteen French parties have put forward candidates for the Parliament in Strasbourg where all 27 member states of the European Union are represented. Voting takes places between June 6th and 9th. (READ MORE from René ter Steege: Poles Vote on Immigration While Other Europeans Suffer)
It can be argued, rightly, that the French and other Europeans care little about the European Parliament, presented as a coffee klatch and besmirched by corruption scandals and influence-peddling by Russia.
Nonetheless, the vote is seen in France as a dress rehearsal for presidential elections in 2027. Marine Le Pen is widely expected to run again, after three failed attempts. A victory in June for her protégé Jordan Bardella would stand her in good stead to finally succeed.
Second on Mr. Bardella’s electoral list is yet another politician with foreign roots. Malika Sorel, the daughter of Algerian immigrants, is a conservative but hitherto politically unattached intellectual said to have joined Mr. Bardella’s team after president Macron had turned her down for a government post.
The immigrant background of both politicians undermines the well-worn reproach of the Left that the National Rally is inherently “racist,” bent on ridding France of foreigners. In reality, France has, albeit not always flawlessly, mostly welcomed immigrants willing to embrace the country. But during the last four decades, the once neutral word immigration has in French acquired a negative connotation, linked with self-chosen apartheid by often Islamic migrants and their offspring who have unleashed a wave of crime and terror on the country.
Jordan Bardella had witnessed this at first hand in 2005, when, aged nine, he lived with his mother Luisa, born in the Italian city of Turin, in a council flat in the drab Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. There, too, youngsters mostly of Arab and African origin created havoc in the first national “uprising” which surpassed itself in the summer of last year, creating an atmosphere of insurrection on a national scale.
Later, Bardella, born in 1995 in the suburb of Drancy, would refer to the rioting around his modest apartment building as his “first political memory.” At the time, his mother eked out a meager living as an educational assistant in nursery schools, witnessing at first hand the linked phenomena of white flight and massive non-Western immigration to the northern suburbs of Paris.
Bardella’s parents had separated when Jordan, their only child, was two years old. His father Olivier, the child of Italian immigrants already settled in France, moved out of Saint-Denis and settled in more prosperous surroundings as an entrepreneur in soft drink vending machines. Jordan paid regular visits to his father, but he was essentially raised by his mother who witnessed him becoming a member, at 16, of the Front National, the right wing party founded and led by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972. The scenes of looting and violence he had witnessed as a frightened young boy from his window had a lot to do with his choice to join a party demonized by the Left and the political center.
Thus, Bardella enjoys impeccable popular credentials. “During my childhood, I watched as my Mum struggled to make ends meet, especially towards the end of each month,” he told a television interviewer in 2022.
His parents had sent him to a private Catholic High School, rather than an Islamized and rowdy public one. Looking back at his youth in Saint-Denis, a former Communist stronghold, and the surrounding department of Seine-Saint-Denis, Mr. Bardella told the weekly Valeurs Actuelles: “I see these places as territories that are lost to the French Republic. Immigration, poverty, and crime are rife, masked drug dealers ply their trade around apartment buildings, I stumbled upon them as I tried to enter ours.”
After obtaining the baccalaureate, he attended the Sorbonne University in Paris where he did not finish his geography studies and turned to politics instead. Starting as a member of the youth wing of the party, which he was later to lead, Mr. Bardella caught the eye of Mr. Le Pen père and his youngest daughter Marine, who in 2015 excluded her father from the party. His anti-Semitic outbursts kept the party, renamed RN in 2018, from being seen as government material. From local party leader to provincial councillor, Mr. Bardella, under Marine Le Pen’s wing, quickly rose through the ranks. (READ MORE: Is Civil War on the Horizon in France?)
In 2017, she put him at the heart of her campaign team for the presidential elections that year, when she was flatly beaten by Emmanuel Macron in the run-off. Her disastrous performance in the only debate with her opponent had a lot to do with it. She maintained Mr. Bardella in her team of close advisors, however, promoting him to the role of her spokesman and leader of the team of RN candidates at the previous European elections, in 2019. He won, with 23 percent of the vote, pipping the candidate of Macron’s party who he is now expected to roundly defeat.
Bardella was elected president of the Rassemblement National in 2022, beating his only opponent, Marine Le Pen’s former partner. Shortly before, she had again failed to defeat Macron, but the media deemed she had lost honorably this time. Marine, freed from the humdrum tasks of leading what is still her party, will now concentrate on possibly her last effort to enter the Elysée.
With Bardella at the helm, for the first time the main nationalist party in France is no longer led by someone from the Le Pen family. But his ties with the “family firm” remain close, as he is romantically linked to Nolwenn Olivier, the daughter of Marine’s elder sister Marie-Caroline and her husband Philippe Olivier, a party apparatchik.
Mr. Bardella is often depicted as “the ideal son-in-law”: well behaved, conventionally dressed. At 6,5 feet and of athletic build he strikes a handsome if somewhat staid figure. He never raises his voice in debates with opponents, the raising of an eyebrow is one of his few signs of irritation. With rare exceptions his vocabulary is sufficiently technocratic and bland not to offend anyone.
This greatly annoys the Left, already bereft of hate-figure Jean-Marie Le Pen, who, at the age of 95, has been placed under legal protection at the request of his three daughters.
Day-to-day events rub in Bardella’s message that something is very rotten in the parallel, Islamic societies developing in many suburbs and even in provincial towns. Early April, a 15-year old schoolboy was beaten to death in a small town near Paris for disobeying the order of brothers of his Muslim girlfriend to stop seeing her. White people are totally absent from pictures of the victim’s funeral in the town of Viry-Châtillon.
At about the same time, a Muslim schoolgirl in the southern town of Montpellier was beaten into a coma by a female classmate for “dressing as a European,” that is to say unveiled. Earlier, the head teacher of a lycée in Paris resigned after receiving death threats for ordering a student to obey the rules on clothing and take off her Islamic headdress.
According to not only Mr. Bardella, France thus reaps the bitter harvest of unbridled immigration from its former colonies. His many enemies in left-wing media claim he stirs up hatred against Muslims and are desperate to dig up some dirt. But a “scoop” by investigative journalists on public television, alleging in January that Mr. Bardella was behind anonymous Twitter-accounts spewing hatred of non-whites, fell flat. He denied it and the evidence was unconvincing.
Other members of his party can or could, with some justification, be seen as admirers of Vladimir Putin, as Marine Le Pen before the invasion of Ukraine, but not Bardella.
At the start of his campaign for the European elections, he avoided the words “great replacement,” judged beyond the pale by his adversaries. Instead, he lambasted “le grand effacement,” the gradual phasing out of the French and other Europeans “by a totally mad immigration policy for over forty years.” (READ MORE: Silent French Minority Wants No Part In Pension Reform Protests)
Will Bardella, someday, replace Marine Le Pen as the presidential candidate of the hard right in France? Even some of her supporters fear that the stigma attached to the name Le Pen will prevent her from ever coming to power. Even with his foreign sounding name, her protégé could pull it off, just like Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant and a French mother, in 2007.