How can you tell when a young politician is acclimatizing to the "system" that his party has been condemning for half a century? Perhaps by his visits with Thierry Solère, a former conservative figure and unofficial adviser to President Emmanuel Macron; or an evening at the home of conservative billionaire media mogul Vincent Bolloré's favorite (and controversial) TV host, Cyril Hanouna, in the hills of Saint-Tropez; or is it by the accession to the presidency of a major group in the European Parliament, a sign of a desire for institutionalization in Brussels. Jordan Bardella didn't end up in the role of French prime minister, as he had hoped, but he hasn't given up on discovering the big wide world.
After the newspaper Libération reported on his repeated visits to Solère in recent months, investigative outlet Mediapart revealed that on July 12, five days after his defeat in the July 7 snap elections, he was at Hanouna's villa in the Gulf of Saint-Tropez. It was a bubble of levity before returning, two days later, to the Strasbourg maze of the European Parliament, at the head of the third largest group in the chamber, per negotiations between Marine Le Pen and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
After failing to become head of the French government, Rassemblement National (RN) President Bardella is continuing his tough apprenticeship in the upper echelons of political power. His supremacy is already being challenged within his own group, Patriots for Europe, by demanding allies. And the cordon sanitairee deployed by mainstream parties to deprive the far right of all power is proving to be made of titanium. Bardella hoped to break it by charming European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, whose anti-abortion stance he condemned during the European campaign.
After courting his group's votes, which the French politician granted her after a bilateral meeting, the Maltese conservative politician superbly ignored him in her round of thanks. The European right wing then prevented Patriots for Europe from winning the vice presidency positions to which it was entitled, leaving the group's members with the unpleasant impression of having been "duped."
Meanwhile, Bardella's other summer project, the reorganization of his party, seems to have already been launched by the woman who claimed to want to withdraw from internal affairs. As the system put in place by the party's official number one is showing its limits, Le Pen is already advancing her ideas for reform, and saying far more than the president himself. In an interview with far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles, published on Wednesday, July 17, she advocated "a process of deconcentration of the movement." This would mean the increased involvement of MPs at the local level – elected officials over whom Le Pen, president of the RN group in the Assemblée Nationale, has authority.
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