The MEP Jordan Bardella has become this Saturday the new leader of the French far-right National Grouping party and picks up the witness from Marine Le Pen, who has decided to leave office to focus on the parliamentary activities of the formation with a view to future elections.
Bardella, acting president since 2021 and considered in his principles a radical element of the party, has obtained 84.4% of the votes against the mayor of Perpignan and historic party, Louis Aliot, a percentage much higher than 67.65% of the votes Marine Le Pen won over Bruno Gollnisch to succeed her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, eleven years ago.
“After more than ten years at the head of the movement, it was healthy to give way, healthy to bring out the talents, the new figures”, Marine Le Pen highlighted.
As for the possible presidential candidacy of the National Group, Le Pen has maintained her aspirations: “I am not leaving the presidency of our party to go on vacation. I am still more mobilized than ever. There will be no rest for me, just like for all of us until that we have straightened out the country. (…) It goes without saying that I will be where the country and the national cause need me”.
Marine Le Pen will now focus on the leadership of her party’s parliamentary bloc, the most important opposition force in Parliament since the June elections, with 89 seats.
The French press highlights that only ten years have passed since Bardella began putting up posters for the party as a member of the National Front youth until he took over the reins of the formation.
Bardella is considered the “shadow” of Marine Le Pen and thus intends to complete the party’s modernization process by focusing on working-class neighborhoods not only in terms of immigration, but also housing, health, education or unemployment, in clear contrast to a identity line defended by Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.
In the debates, Bardella usually cites his mother, a nursery school worker who had problems making ends meet, although he often omits his education at a private institute, or his father, who gave him a Smart car on one of his birthdays. .
Bardella has supported Frexit or Generation Identity, an organization dissolved by the Ministry of the Interior for defending “an ideology that incites hatred and violence towards foreigners and the Muslim religion.” Bardella’s biggest milestone until this Saturday was leading the party’s list for the 2019 European elections. The good result meant that the following year he was appointed vice president and took charge ‘de facto’ of the formation.
Bardella’s victory means that the party is left without a Le Pen at the helm of the formation’s destiny since its foundation as the National Front 50 years ago, but the circumstance is that the 27-year-old MEP, champion of the anti-immigration movements , maintains a relationship with a niece of Le Pen.
