National Rally party president Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen would act as an “executive couple” if the far-right party wins the upcoming French general election.
On Monday night during a televised interview on French commercial television network TF1, Le Pen said that if her party is successful at the polls, she would assume the role of president and Bardella prime minister.
“I’ve always told the French people that for months Bardella and I have been working as an executive couple in order to fulfil at best the duties invested in them by the French people,” she said.
“I think we have a historic opportunity to allow the National Rally to put France back on track.”
The conservative politician said her party would also consider joining forces with another right-wing candidate and get behind its candidate on election day, scheduled for 30 June and 7 July.
On Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced he would dissolve the National Assembly and call for a snap election in the wake of disastrous results for his centrist Renaissance party in the European parliamentary elections.
The shock announcement came shortly after the far-right National Rally (NR) secured a whopping 30 of France’s 81 European Parliament seats and provisionally landed more than 30% of the French vote.
According to the latest estimates, Macron’s Renaissance party secured less than 15% of the vote — just ahead of the Socialists, whom the French president thought he had managed to obliterate from the political scene when he was first elected president in 2017.
The leftist France Unbowed party could finish in fourth place with around 10% of the vote, and the conservative Républicains about 7%.
Who is Bardella?
Bardella is the first person to lead the anti-immigration NR party who is not a member of the Le Pen family.
Born in 1995 in a Parisian suburb, the son of Italian immigrants has enjoyed a meteoric political career. At the 2024 European Union election, he secured twice as many votes as Macron's centrist alliance.
Influenced by the violent riots in the French suburbs in 2005, he entered politics at the age of 17, joining Marine Le Pen's far-right party NR party.
Two years later, he dropped out of a geography course to devote himself to politics and served consecutively as a regional councillor, spokesperson, and vice-president of the party. He then led NR’s list in the 2019 European elections at just 23 years old.
In November 2022, he was elected successor of Le Pen as the president of the far-right party. The following year, he was appointed, for the second consecutive time, as the party’s lead candidate — and is expected to remain at the helm for many years.
Bardella's meticulously crafted narrative has contributed to refining the image of the RN, a party once helmed by Jean-Marie Le Pen from a chateau nestled in an affluent suburb west of the capital.
In his own words, he uses TikTok — where he boasts more than a million followers — as a means "to reach out to young people who are depoliticised and become politicised through social media".
The NR's lead candidate for the EU elections, Bardella, campaigned to limit the free movement of migrants by carrying out national border controls and dialling back EU climate rules.
The party no longer wants to leave the EU and the eurozone but aims to weaken them from within. Accused in a television debate before the elections of bringing about the end of the EU, Bardella countered, "I am not against Europe. I am against the way Europe works."
Aiming for a significant powerbroking position in Europe following the elections, Bardella has distanced his party from the German ally Alternative for Germany (AfD), declaring that it will no longer align with the faction in the European Parliament after a series of controversies.
