The 27-year-old MEP succeeds Marine Le Pen as the successor to the party leader. He received 84.84 percent of the party members’ votes.
Jordan Bardella, the new chairman of the Rassemblement National.
ela./nbe. In France, Jordan Bardella was elected the new chairman of the Rassemblement national on Saturday. The 27-year-old succeeds Marine Le Pen, making him the first party leader who is not a member of the Le Pen family.
Bardella, who is a member of the European Parliament, has already served as interim president for a year. He received 84.84 percent of the votes from party members versus 15.16 percent for his challenger Louis Aliot.
Who is Jordan Bardella?
Jordan Bardella’s candidacy was obvious. The 27-year-old has done everything in his power over the past twelve months to dispel any doubts about his suitability. He held the office with seriousness and discipline and asserted himself in discussion programs also thanks to rhetorical security against ministers and veterans of French politics. Not once has Marine Le Pen publicly expressed dissatisfaction or even rebuked him. It seemed as if Bardella was in a relationship of the utmost trust.
Marine Le Pen had given Bardella a lot of credit early on. Against some doubters, she made him spokesman for the party at the age of only 22 and soon appointed him deputy party leader. With Bardella at the top of the list in the European elections three years ago, the Rassemblement national in France received the most votes.
Bardella comes from an Italian family and grew up in a council flat in one of the notorious Parisian suburbs. Today he uses it to explain his decision to join the Le Pen party at the age of 16. He grew up with his mother, who often ran out of money by the 10th of the month. «We lived next to drug dealers! I said to myself, this can’t be normal.”
He also uses the fact that he has not completed his studies as an argument for his suitability as leader of an opposition party. He does not forget that it was the “over-graduates” and the graduates of the elite university ENA who brought the yellow vests onto the streets, he once said. Long initially focused on working-class issues, Bardella has recently sharpened the tone on immigration. Even if he avoided speaking of “grand remplacement”, he used the argument of the theory widespread among right-wing extremists, according to which the French population should be displaced by immigrants.