With France's far-right leader Marine Le Pen barred from running for president due to an embezzlement conviction, her 29-year-old protégé—and, some say, an even more hardline figure—Jordan Bardella is now the National Rally's (RN) most likely candidate.
On 31 March, a Paris court ruled that Le Pen could not stand for president for five years. She was also sentenced to five years in prison, two of which she will serve. While her lawyers have vowed to appeal, the legal process could drag on for years, making it unlikely she will be on the ballot in 2027.
If Le Pen remains sidelined, attention turns to Bardella, who has carefully cultivated a nationalist image while marketing himself as 'the far-right's Gen Z darling' since he took over the RN's leadership in 2022.
Jordan Bardella's ties to Algeria and Islam
At 16, Bardella joined the RN, a party founded by Holocaust deniers and former Nazi collaborators—one that has long framed French citizens of immigrant descent as second-class and has called for the mass expulsion of foreign-born criminals.
Yet, he stands apart from the Le Pen dynasty and France's far-right elite.
Born in Drancy, a working-class suburb of Paris, Bardella comes from a modest background.
His family has both Italian and Algerian roots. His paternal grandmother, Réjane Mada, is the daughter of Mohand Séghir Mada, who was born in 1903 in Guendouz, Algeria, and moved to France in the 1930s. Meanwhile, his paternal grandfather, Guerrino Bardella, reportedly converted to Islam after moving to Morocco, to facilitate his marriage there.
Despite this, Bardella rarely speaks about his family's links to the Maghreb or Islam—two issues his party relentlessly portrays as existential threats to France.
Instead, he prefers to highlight his upbringing by a single mother who, he claims, often had just €20 left in her purse at the end of the month. He has used this narrative to cultivate a connection with voters in the working-class neighbourhoods, and to justify his lack of an elite education, having dropped out of the University of Paris-Sorbonne to focus on politics.
Though he is a child of immigration, Bardella has rigidly adhered to the RN's anti-immigration platform, vowing to revoke the citizenship of dual nationals convicted of serious offences. His campaign for Matignon in 2024 was built on that promise.
With two million followers on TikTok, Bardella has worked to normalise the RN's hardline stance on immigrants—particularly Muslims—while cultivating a carefully curated online persona.
A video of him getting drunk at a festival, smugly sipping wine he dubbed "the tears of leftists," has only fuelled his appeal among his growing fandom, who churn out fan-cam edits and line up at events to catch a glimpse of him.
Bardella was first elected to the European Parliament at 23 and has since become the public face of the RN. Under his leadership, the party broke records in the 2024 European elections (31.37 percent) and the parliamentary elections (33.35 percent in the first round, together with its allies), all while reversing its financial deficit to report a €4.3 million surplus in 2023.
Yet, despite these electoral gains, Bardella has so far failed to turn the RN into a "party of government."
When he took over RN, he admitted feeling like he was "at the helm of the Titanic." Senior members and activists were leaving for other far-right parties, disillusioned by the RN's failure to distance itself from its extremist past.
The party, originally founded as the National Front, was born out of remnants of the SS and a faction of anti-Semitic French collaborators who opposed Algerian independence—some of whom even attempted to assassinate Charles de Gaulle.
Over the years, the RN has tried to sanitise its image, expelling its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen and rebranding itself as pro-Israel. The final step in that rebranding may be erasing the Le Pen name entirely.
Earlier this month, Bardella became the first RN leader to visit Israel, speaking at a conference on the fight against antisemitism.
Musk and Trump support to Le Pen
In Jacobin, David Broder argued that barring Le Pen from running could backfire, turning her embezzlement conviction into a propaganda coup. That prediction appears to be playing out.
Elon Musk—now an informal adviser to Donald Trump, a convicted felon and the US President, accused the French "radical left" of "abusing" the legal system to silence its opponents.
"This will backfire, like the legal attacks against President Trump", Musk said in a post on X.
Donald Trump Jr., a vocal figure in online right-wing circles, echoed Musk's outrage.
"France is sending Le Pen to jail and barring her from running?! Are they just trying to prove JD Vance was right about everything?" he posted on social media.
France may now become the latest battleground for Trump's allies, who have made supporting European far-right parties a key priority.
What are Bardella chances in becoming France's president?
Polls had long suggested that Le Pen was among the leading contenders to succeed Emmanuel Macron, after his second and final term ends in 2027.
However, electing—or even seriously considering—a 29-year-old as president would be unprecedented in France.
When Emmanuel Macron won in 2017, he was 39. He became the youngest president in the history of the Fifth Republic. For many French voters, a Bardella presidency still seems improbable.
His political inexperience, which have showed in debates before, could make him an easy target for veteran politicians, and in that arena, a TikTok campaign may not be enough to carry him to the Élysée.
For now, the RN's next steps remain unclear. Aside from the expected appeal announcement, there has been little discussion of how the party will navigate Le Pen's absence in 2027.
Bardella, for his part, has kept his reaction brief, lashing out at the court's decision and vowing to stand by his boss.
"Today, it is not only Marine Le Pen who has been unjustly condemned—it is French democracy that has been assassinated", he wrote on social media.
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