Le Pen protégé vows to reclaim sovereignty from EU

Jordan Bardella does not look like the typical European politician. But at the age of just 23, the former Sorbonne geography student and rising star of the French far-right is top of the list of candidates for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National for elections to the European Parliament in May. “We are pretty confident,” he said.

Under her cantankerous father Jean-Marie Le Pen, France’s Front National, as it was then called, was for decades on the political fringe, rendered unelectable to central government in postwar France by its reputation for racism and anti-Semitism.

Today, however, the now renamed RN has been largely “dédiabolisé” — detoxified — by its new leader Ms Le Pen and rendered less remarkable by the rise of similar rightwing parties elsewhere in Europe.

The RN is predicted to win the most votes among French parties contesting the European elections, as it did in 2014, having supplanted the enfeebled traditional parties of left and right as the main opposition to President Emmanuel Macron.

“Marine Le Pen wanted to profoundly change the Front National to make it a party of government,” Mr Bardella, one of her protégés, said in an interview. The number of party members had risen tenfold to 100,000 since she took over in 2011, he said, and the RN was rising in the opinion polls despite being declared dead when Mr Macron beat Ms Le Pen in the second round of the 2017 presidential election.

When people want to emancipate themselves from an elite, an oligarchy . . . they can. There’s a wind of hope, of expectation, blowing everywhere through Europe

Mr Bardella embodies the way Ms Le Pen has rebuilt the party and diversified its image. Younger activists and more women have been brought in as well as senior defectors from more moderate rightwing parties in the attempt to first win influence in Europe and then achieve the ultimate goal: power at home in France.

Ms Le Pen even placed a black woman — teacher Christiane Delannay-Clara from Guadeloupe — 12th on the list of the RN’s candidates, although the audience in the Paris conference hall where the party’s European campaign was launched this month was almost 100 per cent white.

Mr Bardella, who was brought up in a tough neighbourhood of Seine-Saint-Denis north of Paris and is outspokenly opposed to “mass immigration”, said the RN would team up with other “sovereigntist” parties from Brexit Britain, Italy and eastern Europe to challenge the EU’s powers over laws, national frontiers, migration policies, and international trade.

“We are going to try to retrieve our sovereignty from the European Commission,” he said of the EU’s executive body. “In concrete terms, the idea is to have in May the maximum number of sovereigntists elected to the [European] parliament.”

Mr Bardella said the advantage of the British referendum vote to leave the EU — and the rise through national elections of politicians such as Matteo Salvini, the Italian deputy prime minister and leader of the country’s anti-migrant League — was that it showed a possible path to power in France for the RN.

“When people want to emancipate themselves from an elite, an oligarchy . . . they can,” he said. “It is possible. I think there’s a wind of hope, of expectation, that’s blowing everywhere through Europe.”

Among French political parties, it is Ms Le Pen’s RN that appears to have gained the most from the wave of gilets jaunes demonstrations that have shaken Mr Macron’s presidency in recent months, with the protesters’ demands for lower taxes and their attacks on Mr Macron as a “president of the rich” echoing some of the RN’s positions.

“I’m not uncomfortable among the gilets jaunes,” said Mr Bardella, who donned a yellow high-visibility vest and took part in two of the marches last year. “We are one of the few movements to have benefited.”

Like some gilets jaunes marchers, the party is highly protectionist on trade and investment, and it preaches what Mr Bardella calls “economic patriotism”. On the EU and the euro, the RN remains in some disarray, after it backtracked on earlier pledges to abandon the euro and hold a French referendum on leaving the EU in the face of strongly pro-Europe sentiment among the French.

But its trademark policies of opposing immigration and the “Islamisation” of France continue to resonate strongly with millions of voters who fear France is being swamped with legal and illegal migrants.

When the RN launched its European campaign in Paris this month at the Maison de la Mutualité — a venue previously associated with the left — it fell to Mr Bardella to make the most explicitly anti-migration speech of the day.

“We won’t spend a single euro to welcome immigrants so long as a single French person is sleeping on the street,” he said to cheers and the waving of French flags.

Interviewed two days later, Mr Bardella remained adamant on curbing immigration, saying that France could limit the net number of new arrivals to 10,000 a year and brushing aside the suggestion that his Italian surname meant everyone was an immigrant if one went back far enough. “Does that mean we have to accept everyone from the whole world because of that?” he said.

For the RN, a triumph in the European elections would bring it one step closer to power in Paris. “I think we will come to power in the years ahead,” said Mr Bardella. “There is this last step to reach — that of credibility, and we’re doing it.”