Marine Le Pen vs. Jordan Bardella: France’s next power struggle

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PARIS — Get ready for the wars of succession, French far-right edition.

Marine Le Pen and her 28-year-old protégé, Jordan Bardella, stumbled in the second round of the French parliamentary election Sunday, with projections giving their far-right National Rally party between 120 and 150 MPs, behind French President Emmanuel Macron’s coalition and the first-place finishers in the left-wing alliance.

As the party digests a disappointing result in Sunday’s legislative election, expect finger-pointing, recriminations and — if the past is any guide — even the expulsion of top officials blamed for the result.

With National Rally officials looking with apprehension at the party’s next big challenge, seizing the Elysée presidential palace in 2027, a budding rivalry between student and master could grow into one that tears apart one of the most successful political partnerships in French postwar history.

At stake is the question of who will lead France’s right-wing nationalist forces into battle for the country’s presidency in three years’ time — or even earlier if Macron takes the unlikely step of leaving power before the end of his term.

While the two have been careful to show unity in public, Bardella’s youth, his greater popularity with the party’s base and his growing independence on matters of policy are all implicit threats to Le Pen’s moral authority over the National Rally. Speaking to journalists in January, Le Pen acknowledged Bardella’s qualities but said she had “granted him an opportunity.”

As for Bardella, he’s repeatedly said that Le Pen is the “natural candidate” for the presidency and that he won’t be the “Emmanuel Macron of Marine Le Pen” — referring to how President Macron turned against his own benefactor, then President François Hollande, before storming his way to the presidency in 2017.

Asked about a possible split, Jean-Lin Lacapelle, a Le Pen ally said “It’s out of the question. The fact is that they are a winning ticket together.”

Yet in private conversations with POLITICO, current and former party insiders as well as allies of both far-right leaders weren’t so sure, pointing out that Bardella’s political brand has broader appeal than Le Pen’s.

“Some French people believe that Jordan Bardella has better chances of winning [the presidential election] than Marine Le Pen,” said one National Rally lawmaker who asked not to be named to discuss a highly sensitive matter. “Perhaps we aren’t careful enough [about the prospect of a rivalry]. There is a danger. We need to be careful.”

The real question, several insiders said, is less about if than when Bardella takes over: whether Bardella will gracefully wait until Le Pen makes a fourth bid for the presidency — or if he’ll try to speed up the clock by staging an internal coup or breaking from the National Rally to form his own party, like Macron did after splitting from the socialist Hollande back in 2016.

“I don’t believe there will be a putsch before 2027, but after that, who knows?” said a conservative ally who added that Bardella was a “more efficient brand, who doesn’t have the name Le Pen and doesn’t carry the legacy of their outrages.”

Le Pen and Bardella, a “winning ticket”

There’s no doubt that Le Pen gave Bardella his start in politics, but the apprentice has quickly outpaced his teacher.

After joining the party, then named the National Front, at 17 in 2012, he rapidly ascended its ranks to lead its electoral list in the 2019 European Parliament elections, aged 23. (The party won 23.3 percent of the vote, beating Macron’s centrist alliance.)

Bardella was then named the party’s acting president during France’s 2022 presidential election and became its official leader a few months later. At the time Bardella, attuned to the need to display loyalty in a party that had previously only been led by Le Pens, credited his success to what he called a “singular relationship of inestimable confidence” with his mentor.

Since then, Le Pen and Bardella have presented themselves as a “ticket” taking on France’s entrenched political establishment. Thanks to her status as the scion of the Le Pen dynasty — she inherited the party’s leadership from her father, Jean-Marie, in 2011 — she represents change within continuity and an organic link back to the party’s history.

Yet this strength is also her weakness: Le Pen’s name is indelibly linked to the antisemitic and racist outrages of her father, whom she expelled from the party in 2015.

That’s where Bardella comes in. An outsider with no blood links to the Le Pen firm, the rising prince of the far-right enjoys greater appeal with parts of the electorate that have traditionally recoiled from dropping a National Rally vote into the ballot box. Le Pen herself said as much during a January 2024 huddle with journalists: “Jordan is popular with the higher professional categories, and I’m delighted by that.”

Bardella also helps to widen the party’s reach thanks to his personal background. Unlike the bourgeois Le Pen, who grew up in a mansion donated to her father in the tiny Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, Bardella spent his youth in the hardscrabble Paris district of Seine-Saint-Denis, rubbing shoulders with the children of immigrants and soaking up the lingo and popular references of the French youth.

Together, they triangulate two crucial demographics. Le Pen pulls in traditional National Rally supporters and voters from the deindustrialized north of the country drawn to her “protect-the-weak” brand of nationalism while Bardella wins over first-time voters, young males and higher socio-economic categories.

“They’re indispensable to each other, and they complete each other,” added Lacapelle, underscoring how well the duo had performed in the 2024 European Parliament election, when the party raked in a third of the vote, more than double its nearest rival.

But others point out that the idea of running on a “ticket” — ie., presenting two or more names as candidates — is highly unusual in presidential campaigns in which a single candidate has traditionally faced the nation, alone.

Indeed, France’s hyper-centralized system of government, frequently described as a presidential monarchy, effectively negates the idea of two main characters sharing power in a meaningful way.

At best, one takes the presidency, where most of the power resides, and the other becomes that person’s prime minister, a lower-ranked, almost subservient, role.

That means, when push comes to shove, even strong allies are set up to become rivals.

Putin and the French far right

The question facing the far right is: How long will Bardella agree to remain second fiddle to Le Pen? A series of disagreements over key policy questions — namely, the party’s relationship with Russia — suggest his vows of loyalty may not be as ironclad as he would like them to seem.

Speaking to the newspaper l’Opinion in February 2023, Bardella stated that the National Rally had shown “collective naivety regarding Vladimir Putin’s ambitions.”

The comment shocked many people in a party that owes its financial survival partly to a Kremlin-endorsed loan for €9 million, and whose cadres have done favors for Putin by working as observers to validate the results of elections in Russia and Russia-controlled territories of Ukraine.

The controversy didn’t stop Bardella from doubling down a year later, telling a news conference that the “bellicose statements of President Putin represent a danger for our personal security as a nation.”

Le Pen, by contrast, has been careful not to criticize Putin directly. Questioned about the Russian president’s reelection earlier this year, Le Pen said: “We must live with it … We deal with reality as it is and not the world as we’d like it to be.”

Four days before the parliamentary election, Moscow returned the favor: “The people of France are seeking a foreign policy that serves their national interests & a break from the dictate of Washington & Brussels,” its foreign ministry wrote on the social media platform X.

On domestic policy as well, Le Pen and Bardella occasionally diverge — as when Bardella earlier this year criticized the idea of imposing minimum prices for French agricultural products. The minimum price proposal is a longtime party position, and Le Pen was quick to correct her protégé during a question-and-answer session at the National Assembly.

Jordan Bardella’s path to the presidency

As attention turns to the presidential election, and the National Rally digests its disappointing performance Sunday, some on the right of French politics are blunt about what they say is Bardella’s superior appeal.

“I know a lot of people who say they are voting Jordan not Le Pen,” said one adviser from the Les Républicains conservative party. “There is a wave of excitement, a Bardella trend. He succeeds in making people feel relaxed about voting [for the National Rally].”

That said, the same adviser added that Bardella “could not eject her. The Le Pen brand is more solid.”

Yet there is a scenario in which Bardella wouldn’t have to take on Le Pen: if France’s legal system does the job for him.

Le Pen, along with 27 other National Rally members, faces trial on September 30 over accusations that she misused funds from the European Parliament to pay for campaign activities — allegations she denies. If found guilty, Le Pen could lose her right to run in elections, which would open up a window for Bardella to run, uncontested, in 2027.

“Marine could go down during her trial,” said a former National Rally aide, reflecting on Bardella’s chances of going it alone. “I think that, deep down, he is gearing up for it.”

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