Jordan Bardella was supposed to be a different kind of far-right French politician: young, technically savvy, a long way from the poisonous demagoguery and street fighting of the old Front National. In 2021, just before his 26th birthday, he was made acting president of the ostensibly reformed party, replacing his mentor, Marine Le Pen, though she is still its driving force. She had renamed it the Rassemblement National (National Rally) and was supposed to have offloaded its racists and Nazi nostalgists.
Mediapart, the investigative news site, last month published some of Bardella’s Facebook Messenger correspondence from when he was an aspiring FN apparatchik in 2013. Leaked by former party colleagues, it included such conspiratorial claims as ‘the Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them and rob them’ and ‘all the banks are owned by Jews.’ When Bardella denied that the messages were his, Mediapart produced technical evidence, including screenshots of the original posts authenticated by Meta, Facebook’s parent company. The data extraction was certified by a court bailiff.
The founders of the FN in 1972 included veterans of a French division of the Waffen-SS as well as Jean-Marie Le Pen, another former soldier, who had tortured prisoners during the Algerian war of independence. Le Pen, who died last year at the age of 96, was repeatedly convicted of crimes including Holocaust denial and inciting racial hatred.
The runner-up to Jacques Chirac in the 2002 presidential election, Le Pen was still the honorary president of the FN when Bardella joined the party in 2012, and enormously popular with the rank and file. Le Pen’s daughter had replaced him as leader in 2011. She pledged to carry out a nominal dédiabolisation (‘de-demonisation’) that included the theatrical expulsion of her father in 2015 after he refused to apologise for calling the Nazi gas chambers ‘a detail of history’.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/october/dediabolisation
Since he denied writing the Facebook messages, rival politicians have joined other public figures in openly referring to Bardella as a liar as well as an antisemite.
