Jordan Bardella: The ‘blank canvas’ who could be France’s youngest president

Born in 1995, the young Jordan was brought up by his Italian-born single mother, Luisa, on the outskirts of Paris.

Although Bardella has often said Luisa struggled to make ends meet, his father Olivier, also of Italian origin, ran a drinks distribution business and lived in the more affluent town of Montmorency. That detail undercuts the hard-luck narrative surrounding Bardella’s early years which he would later use to appeal to a wider electorate.

Neither parent was particularly political, and Bardella had to convince his mother to allow him to join what was then the National Front (FN) as a 17-year-old in 2012. He climbed the ranks quickly, becoming local departmental secretary at 19 and regional councillor for the Paris region at 20. Along the way, he dropped out of university to focus on his political career.

Bardella would later attribute the initial decision to join the party to a fascination with the party’s figurehead, Marine Le Pen, who had taken the reins of the party from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2011 and was working to turn it from fringe, extremist movement to respectable political force.

“There’s something about her that others don’t have,” Bardella said in 2021. “She has a character, an energy… a courage that speak to me.”

The interest was reciprocated. Early on, Bardella entered the RN’s inner circle through his relationship with the daughter of an old National Front hand, Frederick Chatillon; by 2017, Le Pen had named Bardella party spokesman.

In 2019 he became the European Parliament’s second-youngest MEP, and at 27 – already one of the party’s most visible figures – he was elected president of the RN.

Then, in 2024, it looked like Bardella was going to make another leap ahead. National Rally emerged with 33% of the vote in the first round of a snap parliamentary election, bringing him within touching distance of becoming prime minister.

The second round resulted in a victory for a centre-left alliance, but in the two years since, Bardella’s popularity has remained solid. His approval rating is now at 40%; Marine Le Pen’s has remained stable at 39%.