The alliance between Le Pen and Bardella has broken down. Accusations of anti-Semitism against the (former) heir apparent and moles within the party

Paris. Jordan Bardella tells everyone that things are going well between him and Marine Le Pen, and that the Court of Appeal’s ruling on 7 July – which restored his mentor’s eligibility to stand for president – has not damaged their relationship: the heir apparent will remain loyal to the party line, supporting the ‘godmother of French sovereignty’ – the woman who moulded him and promoted him in record time to the leadership of the Rassemblement National (RN) – ‘two thousand per cent’. Yet behind the façade of unity, on display last Saturday during the Mass for Pope Leo XIV at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, a quiet ‘debardellisation’ has been underway since this summer.

The composition of the campaign team ahead of next year’s presidential election is the clearest indication of this. On 14 September, Le Pen brought men and women from her inner circle into the heart of the campaign machinery. First and foremost, Renaud Labaye, a long-standing loyalist of the leader, who has been appointed deputy campaign director and will work alongside Yoann Gillet, who has held the same post since 3 July. Sébastien Chenu, an MP and Marine’s right-hand man, has been appointed coordinator of elected representatives, whilst Andréa Kotarac, who left Mélenchon’s left in 2019 to embrace Le Penism, has been named campaign spokesperson. But it is also those who have been removed, or sidelined, that reveal this new phase for the RN. François Durvye, an economic adviser close to Bardella and a key figure in the attempt to build a more economically liberal RN, has stepped down. Pierre-Romain Thionnet, a staunch Bardella loyalist, has been removed from the chairmanship of the party’s youth wing, and Victor Chabert, another of Bardella’s staunchest supporters, remains head of the RN’s press office but will not serve as the presidential campaign’s press officer. Finally, policy work has returned to the control of the ‘Horaces’, the group of intellectuals close to Marine Le Pen, under the supervision of the sovereigntist leader’s brother-in-law and special adviser, Philippe Olivier.

Political differences over certain key issues in the programme have also highlighted the growing rift between the two in recent months. Marine, should she be elected to the Élysée, promises to repeal the pension reform introduced by Emmanuel Macron, which raised the retirement age from 62 to 64, and for certain categories she does not rule out lowering it further, to 60. Bardella, on the other hand, advocates a more liberal stance, in line with that of Medef, the French employers’ organisation, and has on several occasions expressed doubts about the sustainability of the current pension system. There is also a divide over the Islamic headscarf, one of the sovereignist party’s long-standing issues. Marine has promised to ban it in public spaces – not just in schools – via a referendum, thereby meeting the demands of the party’s conservative wing, whilst Bardella has taken a more cautious stance, insisting on the need to distinguish between the Muslim faith and Islamism. This is not a definitive ideological split, but it demonstrates the existence of two strategies within RN: Marine’s, which returns to mobilising the traditional identity-based themes of the Front National, and Bardella’s, which is more geared towards building his own image as a national right-wing figure capable of appealing even to voters whom the old RN never reached.

For over a year, the balance of power had been almost the reverse of what it traditionally is. Marine, weakened by the legal proceedings concerning her European parliamentary assistants and by the prospect of possible ineligibility following the first-instance ruling in March 2025, had made way for her heir apparent ahead of the presidential elections. Bardella had begun to forge his own political identity, achieving a level of popularity in numerous polls that even surpassed that of his mentor. Then came the ruling of 7 July, which turned the situation on its head once again: the Court of Appeal’s decision allowed Le Pen to immediately relaunch her candidacy for 2027, whilst Bardella reverted to his role as the designated prime minister – the eternal number two. It is against this backdrop that what some observers have termed the ‘re-Le Penisation’ of the RN has begun to take shape – that is, Marine’s reclaiming of personal and familial control over the party’s structure. The reconciliation between Marine and Marion Maréchal – the niece who, in 2022, had sided with the inflammatory polemicist Éric Zemmour, leader of Réconquête, against her aunt – points in this direction. Marion, currently a Member of the European Parliament and president of the Identité-Libertés party, published a book in January with the telling title, "Si tu te sens Le Pen", and following the death of her grandfather and National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, she has gradually re-established ties with the family. Marine wants to bring her back into her political orbit, even though her precise role in the campaign has not yet been defined, because she can broaden the scope of the future campaign further to the right: a problem for Bardella, who in 2024 had helped to curb the inclusion of men and women close to Marion on the lists for the parliamentary elections.

Tensions between the two came to a head at the end of August. According to Libération, during an internal meeting, Bardella reportedly reacted to the plan to give Marion more space with the phrase: “C’est elle ou moi”, meaning ‘it’s her or me’. The RN president’s position has been further complicated in recent days by revelations from Mediapart regarding anti-Semitic messages he allegedly wrote when he was 17 and a rank-and-file party activist. “All banks are owned by Jews. (…) The Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them and rob them; a Zionist is necessarily a Jew, deep down. In France, two excellent examples are BHL (Bernard Henri-Lévy) and (Jacques) Attali. And this is precisely what they want: a New World Order dominated by Israel, with Jerusalem, of course, as its capital”, Bardella is reported to have written. Mediapart claims to have investigated the matter for months and to be in possession of dozens of independently verified conversations. Bardella has categorically denied being the author of those statements and says he is prepared to take Mediapart to court. As things stand, these are therefore contested allegations, not facts established in court, but politically the issue is explosive because it strikes at the very heart of one of the pillars of the RN’s transformation under Marine: ‘dédiabolisation’, that is, the attempt to make the party presentable to a much broader electorate than its historical base.

“I think the main damage to the RN, following these revelations, is the potential loss of undecided voters – that is, those who, in a possible second round against the leader of the radical left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, might have been tempted to vote for Marine Le Pen without being regular voters for the party,” political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, director of the Observatoire des radicalités politiques at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, tells Il Foglio. Some argue that Bardella was only 17, and that at that age people say all sorts of things. “One is always responsible for what one writes. That does not, however, mean that one holds the same views for one’s entire life. But one thing is certain: the damage is done. Marine Le Pen’s future prime minister-designate now has hundreds of articles claiming he was anti-Semitic,” emphasises Camus. But who passed the messages on to Mediapart, which promises to publish them in the coming days? “According to some, they come from supporters of Alain Soral,” says Camus, referring to the anti-Semitic writer and former member of the National Front who is said to have influenced the political development of the RN president and some of his close associates when they were teenagers. “It would therefore appear to be an act of revenge against Bardella who, by travelling to Israel and adopting pro-Israeli positions in recent times, has in some way betrayed the ideals of his youth,” concludes Camus.