France’s far-right National Rally (RN) has chosen a 27-year-old from the Paris banlieue who joined the party as a teenager as its new president to replace Marine Le Pen.
The result means that for the first time since the party – originally the National Front – was created in 1972, it will not be led by a Le Pen.
Le Pen protégé Jordan Bardella, who has been acting president for a year, beat Louis Aliot, 53, the mayor of Perpignan, a party heavyweight and former partner of Le Pen, 85% to 15 % of party members who voted.
There was applause and a standing ovation when Le Pen announced the result. The move comes at a tense time for the RN after one of its MPs was suspended from parliament over a racist outburst last week.
Addressing the party, Le Pen said that after more than a decade it was time to make way for someone new. Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie gave the reigns to the youngest of his three daughters in 2011, who changed her name at a party conference in 2018.
Marine Le Pen resigns as president of the RN to concentrate on directing its actions in the national assembly. In legislative elections earlier this year that robbed Emmanuel Macron of his parliamentary majority, the party won a record 89 seats.
Bardella, known as a soft-spoken speaker who is rarely seen in public in a sharp navy suit and tie, has been filling in for Le Pen while campaigning in the presidential election, which she lost to Macron for the second time in a runoff . in May this year, a repeat of the 2017 result.
In February, Bardella was investigated after describing the banlieue town of Trappes, home to a large immigrant community, as an “Islamic republic” in France. He is a staunch Eurosceptic, although Le Pen’s party has stopped campaigning for Frexit.
After Giorgia Meloni won the Italian election, Bardella called it a “lesson in humility for the European Union”, accusing her of trying to influence the vote. “No threat of any kind can stop democracy. The people of Europe are raising their heads and taking their destiny into their own hands,” he said.
Born in the Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis to a French father and Italian mother, Bardella has quickly risen through the ranks of the far-right party he joined when he was 16, and rose to public prominence in 2017 when he became its spokesperson. He enjoys a privileged and personal relationship with the Le Pen family, as his partner is Nolwenn Olivier, Le Pen’s niece.
Although Bardella is a hard-line idealist, Aliot had positioned himself as the man to continue the process of “demonization” of the party that Le Pen started more than a decade ago.
After Le Pen took over the FN, she set about cleaning up her image, by then inextricably linked to the xenophobic, shaved-headed neo-Nazi thugs who supported her father. Members were expelled for racist and anti-Semitic statements or for defending Philippe Pétain, the head of the Vichy French government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s. In 2015, after several warnings about his behavior, he expelled his own father.
Critics said the wash operation was more about style than substance, but it worked. In 2012, Le Pen won 17.9% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. In 2017 it rose to 21.3%, and in 2022 to 23.15%. In 2014, the RN candidate list, headed by Bardella, won the European elections in France, with 24.9% of the vote, sending 25 representatives to the European Parliament.
However, the RN was again at the center of a racist row last week as its deputy Grégoire de Fournas was expelled from parliament for two weeks and fined half his salary for two months afterwards of shouting “Go back to Africa” when a black member of the lower house questioned the government about migrants.
Asked last week who she would support in the party’s leadership race, Le Pen declined to say. “I said I would stay neutral,” he told Télématin television. Appearing on BFMTV, he added: “There is no difference [political] line between Jordan Bardell and Louis Aliot.