Jordan Bardella could be French PM at 28. But who is he really?

The official version of Mr Bardella – the one on the label – is a young man who grew up in a deprived estate in Seine-Saint-Denis and after living with the scourge of drugs, poverty, lawlessness and uncontrolled immigration came to believe that only the hard-right had the answer.

This is “le story-telling”, a French borrowing from the world of marketing.

As he himself has said: “I am in politics because of everything I lived through there. To stop that becoming the norm for the whole of France. Because what happens there is not normal.”

The truth is more nuanced. Mr Bardella was indeed brought up by his single mother, Luisa, in the Cité Gabriel-Péri in the town of Saint-Denis, so his experience is real enough. Both his parents are of Italian origin, and his father had an Algerian grandmother.

But Mr Bardella’s father, Olivier, who moved out when Jordan was very young, ran a drinks distribution business, and was relatively well off. He lived in the commuter town of Montmorency. And Mr Bardella did not go to the nearest state school, but to a semi-private Catholic establishment popular with the middle-classes.

“The young Bardella had a foot on either side of the tracks,” said Pierre-Stéphane Fort, the author of a critical biography of the RN president.

For a recent profile in Le Monde newspaper, the authors went back to Saint-Denis to find friends and acquaintances of the young Mr Bardella.

They found he had left little trace. Friends – of mixed racial backgrounds — remembered that he was a fan of video games, and set up a YouTube channel to discuss the latest releases. They recalled that he had given literacy classes to immigrants after hours at his lycée when he was 16. But they did not remember any particular interest in far-right politics.

“My theory is that he looked around the political world and spotted the place where there was the best chance of climbing the ladder,” Chantal Chatelain, a teacher at his lycée, told Le Monde.

Mr Bardella joined the party at 17, and his rise was meteoric. It happened because he became part of Ms Le Pen’s outer circle.

Much at the top of the RN operates around personal relationships and clan loyalties, as it did when Ms Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, was at the helm of the party that was then known as the Front National (FN). Mr Bardella became the boyfriend of the daughter of an old FN hand, Frederick Chatillon.