Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National, direct heir of the National Front of Le Pen father and daughter, stands high in the polls for the French presidential elections where it is given around 30 percent. The choice of Jordan Bardella renews the image of the leadership in the party: it allows us to overcome the nepotism between her father Jean-Marie and her daughter Marine by putting forward a young candidate (28 years old), capable of undermining the forty-year-old Emmanuel Macron.
Born in the Parisian suburbs, he began political activity at a very young age and now appears to be a highly experienced leader. The Le Pen family has always had difficulty in making people forget their belonging to the big bourgeoisie, a problem that Bardella does not have which represents a break in the filiation that made Le Pen’s Rassemblement National a continuation of the historical far right with roots in the ultra-nationalists, in the fight for French Algeria or in monarchist movements. Bardella, with his 1.9 million followers on TikTok, also presents himself as a political influencer, careful to channel communication into short but highly impactful videos on the young segment of the electorate.
Even from a programmatic point of view, the Rassemblement National has evolved, with a mix between protectionism and relative maintenance of European structures, it has made a change on EU issues: the “Europe of Nations” However, it does not want to call into question the foundations of European economic prosperity. This is a very difficult exercise and many have pointed the finger at the inconsistencies of the program which evokes protectionism with ease, criticisms which do not really weaken the growing consensus for the party.
The Rassemblement National continues its function as a protest container for French society. Immigration, social hardship, violence, territorial disparities: here are some of the themes that the party proposes tirelessly. And this function of denunciation is also facilitated by the fact that having never exercised executive power, he has not been confronted with the complex and often disappointing reality of government, and therefore the idea remains that one could try the “RN” when everyone has failed. But then we must underline the ideological strength of the national glue: the Rassemblement National is the only party that simplistically proposes solutions to all the problems with the nationalist mantra. From this point of view, the evocation of “France” as a totem concept endowed with thaumaturgical virtues takes up an ancient tradition, the national one which, among other things, was also inspired by the monarchic one. Explaining rationally that this is a huge hoax is difficult, and this repetition is capable of seducing a centre-right electorate such as the neo-Gaullist one, which for a long time considered the reference to France as fundamental and which no longer hesitates to vote for a cleaned up Rassemblement National.
The RN finally benefits from the physiological rejection of the outgoing president: Emmanuel Macron pays for his stay in power and the negative crystallization around unpopular measures or events, such as the opposed pension reform. We must add to this scenario that the defense of Ukraine “no ifs or buts”, one of Macron’s strong themes, is being eroded in France as elsewhere by tiredness from the conflict, but the French president also finds himself at a very delicate point in the his second mandate, having among other things not allowed an alternative leadership to assert itself in his field. Prime Minister Attal, who until a few weeks ago was full of high hopes, now seems to be in the meat grinder of an electoral campaign where he has never emerged from subservience to the president. Finally, it should be noted that in France the scrutiny of the European elections, with proportional lists on a national basis, is very different from that for the political and presidential elections with a two-round majority system, a method which for the moment benefits the Rassemblement National but which will change for the 2027 elections.
