For months, the 30-year-old Jordan Bardella has been edging closer to the French presidency. Now, after a surprise court ruling that allows twice-convicted embezzler Marine Le Pen to run for the far right National Rally instead, the dauphin of France’s far right has been cast aside.
‘Boy Jordy’, the champagne-quaffing populist who has become a hit on TikTok, consistently polls several points higher than Le Pen. But he remains obliged to submit to the cardinal rule of the party that was founded as the National Front by Marine’s dad, convicted Holocaust denier and Vichy nostalgist Jean-Marie in 1972: it’s the Le Pens or no one.
Marine has announced an American-style “winning ticket” with Bardella as her obedient prime minister in any future National Rally government. The young pretender will not be keen on playing a second fiddle Boy Wonder to her Batman, and not just because of the risks of Le Pen’s Trumpian strategy.
As Bardella has risen in the polls, rather than remain submissive to his ‘guardian’ Le Pen, an internecine war has broken out between their different camps of supporters. The supposedly friendly running mates have become enemies.
Le Pen could still end up having her security tag punishment confirmed on appeal – or receiving an even stiffer sentence. But Trump-style, she is gambling that winning power is her only way to save herself from the consequences of her conviction – and stop her now-nemesis Bardella from stealing what she regards as her birthright.
None of the legal carry-on – what centrist presidential candidate Gabriel Attal accurately condemned as a “form of judicial guerrilla warfare to run for office” by a candidate “holding the entire presidential campaign hostage” – will alter the barely concealed feud between the confirmed rivals. Personal, generational, and ideological, the struggle will continue to infect the party and French politics right up to next April’s ballot, a contest the party remains on track to win.
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To understand how the rift in the National Rally emerged, one must go back to March 2025 and Le Pen’s guilty verdict on corruption charges of funnelling almost 3 million pounds of European taxpayer funds to payments for her own party staff. Relations were going swimmingly before then, and Bardella was even suggesting he wanted to be future president Le Pen’s ambassador in Rome – until her conviction and ban on running for office threw everything into disarray. Since that moment, the ambience in the party has been like an episode of Succession.
The skirmishing factions have been at loggerheads over economics and hot-button issues like France’s retirement age. Bardella, who dropped out of university but has been mentored by billionaire business figures like Vincent Bolloré, is more economically liberal. Meanwhile, he has tried to change the optics, although not the substance, of the RN’s stances on Russia, long the Achilles heel of Le Pen. She has been photographed with Putin in Moscow and obtained millions of euros in loans for the party from Kremlin-backed banks.
The French press has been full of leaked stories about “Bardella of Monaco’s” luxury lifestyle with his party-hard entourage, dubbed the “Bardella boys”. His penchant for bubbly-soaked soirées in bougie nightclubs with his Italian aristo girlfriend Princess Maria Carolina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies has appalled many in the National Rally old guard. They are careful to project an anti-elitist image despite the Le Pen clan’s own deliberate accumulation of wealth off the back of political power.
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Le Pen even announced on the eve of the ruling that she was installing her niece, the granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and ex-girlfriend of Bardella, Nolwenn Olivier, as communications director for the party’s presidential campaign. As La Tribune Dimanche newspaper put it, she wanted to “piss on the carpet” and ensure her clan’s grip on the party.
Long considered complementary, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s blood heir and her chosen successor are now confirmed adversaries. An RN parliamentarian told Franc-Tireur magazine the entire party risked imploding.
“The protégé became the heir apparent, then the challenger, and finally the contender,” says author and political journalist David Medioni. In a March joint appearance, appropriately held in the Champagne region, activists interrupted Bardella’s speech with chants of “Jordan for president!” and “Jordan, save us!”, right under Le Pen’s clearly peeved and jealous gaze.
The two factions are still struggling for supremacy in a kind of cold war. Just as in the old days of the French monarchy, the dauphin and the Queen have their separate courts. However, there is no doubt that the Bardella brand has taken hold in the public imagination and may be missed now he has been ‘cheated’ of a presidential run.
“He is the ideal son-in-law, polished, crafted to reassure in a rockstar style,” wrote Medioni in a joint investigative report with Les Electrons Libres editor Benjamin Sire and Franc-Tireur’s Thierry Keller. But, he added, “hubris and privilege are beginning to tarnish the image” after Bardella was photographed “like a bourgeois while his party celebrates the common people”.
This was a reference to pictures of Bardella holding a champagne flute at the Monaco Grand Prix while on the arm of his princess partner while in other parts of France on the same day, silent marches were being held across the country in tribute to an 11-year-old girl who had been raped and murdered.
“Politics was a way for him to belong to the jet set, and he’s done it,” says his former media coach Pascal Humeau. But two questions remain.
Do the French still want a young and inexperienced bling-bling far right president or do they prefer the Le Pen original? And finally, will the loathing between the two collapse the party’s greatest chance at winning power since it exploded on the European political scene 54 years ago?
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