I’m old enough to remember when The Economist put France’s Emmanuel Macron on its cover, with the phrase “Europe’s saviour?”.
Let’s just say that the question mark at least has (sort of) stood the test of time.
In many ways Macron resembles Tony Blair. Both marketed themselves as centrists (although, unlike Blair, Macron made little effort to conceal the extent to which he wanted to be a disruptive force), but in reality they were (and are) radical “centrists,” and that’s something very different indeed.
The ruin that Blair left behind took a while to be seen for the horror it is, whereas Macron is having to stagger through the rubble while he is still in office (which will be until 2027). Maybe he can turn things around before then, but a succession of weak governments and a looming financial crisis suggest that he has left it too late.
And so to this report from the Daily Telegraph’s Henry Samuel, which describes the ascent of Jordan Bardella, the 30-year-old who has headed the RN (Rassemblement national), Marine Le Pen’s party, for a couple of years now. Since Le Pen’s conviction in an EU corruption case, she has been ineligible to run for the presidency and, with her approval, Bardella is, provisionally at least, the RN’s candidate for 2027.
Samuel:
Even if [Le Pen’s] conviction is overturned on appeal in January, it will probably be too late for her to campaign, she said, adding that in that case, the choice of Mr. Bardella becomes “obvious” and “necessary in the interests of the country”.
However, even if Ms. Le Pen were allowed to run she scores slightly lower than Mr. Bardella at 34 per cent.
If it is true (I have no view, but France is France) that Le Pen’s prosecution was selective and designed to damage the RN’s chances in the presidential election, the fact that Bardella is proving a stronger challenger than Le Pen is ironic. Bardella is polling at 35 percent, trailed by Édouard Philippe, a conventional figure of the center-right who polls at 15.5 percent, followed by Jean-Luc Melenchon on 12.5 percent, a figure on the hard-left who draws considerable support from Muslim voters and knows that hints (or more than hints) of antisemitism have their uses.
As Samuel reports, Bardella is on a book tour on a route tied to next year’s municipal elections, but his progress through northern France is looking more than a little presidential and is being well received.
Inevitably, given Bardella’s style and age, Samuel draws some comparisons with a certain mayor-elect:
Mr. Bardella’s mix of digital reach and carefully cultivated grassroots momentum has prompted comparisons with another rising political star, Zohran Mamdani, who recently swept to power in New York.
They sit at opposite poles ideologically — Mr. Bardella nationalist, anti-immigration, Eurosceptic; Mr. Mamdani progressive, anti-capitalist, pro-housing — but the energy, the digital language, and the anti-establishment mood are uncannily similar.
For all his Mamdani-level inexperience, Bardella is clearly emerging as a political figure in his own right. He’s no longer just a stand-in for Le Pen, and this evolution is reflected in a shift, at least in his rhetoric, in a more economically liberal direction. Hitherto the RN has been a classic horseshoe party of the right, with its right-wing positions (on immigration, say) accompanied by leftist economics. That’s where the party’s heart still lies, but Bardella knows that if he is to win the presidency, he will need the votes of more traditional, typically older conservatives, who have no interest in anything that smacks of socialism. Judging by some of the leftist positions that the RN has been taking in parliament, squaring that circle will not be straightforward. Indeed, it could sink him.
One position Bardella has taken that caught my eye is his idea that the European Central Bank (ECB) should start buying French government bonds (to keep down the interest France pays on its debt). France’s ten-year bond currently yields 3.49 percent, in line with recent peaks, but above Italy’s (3.47 percent), not something that Paris appreciates. Moreover, Italian interest rates are falling. They reached a 2025 peak of 3.9 percent earlier this year. France’s debt/GDP ratio is about 115 percent, and its budget deficit is about 5.4 percent. Deep divisions over how to reduce that deficit go a long way to explaining the short shelf-lives of recent French governments and the rise in French interest rates. The idea that the ECB should step in to help out would enrage Germany, which has growing economic problems of its own to contend with.
France is the EU’s second largest economy, and there are murmurings that the eurozone could be heading to another crisis. 2027 is a long way away, and there is a lot that can happen between now and then, but if Bardella looks like winning, those murmurings will grow much louder — if the euro dam has not already broken.
In other news (via Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator):
A comprehensive study published in 2021 reported that 65 per cent of Muslims pupils in French schools consider Islamic law superior to Republican law. . . .
In the two years since Hamas attacked Israel, anti-Semitism in France has reached ‘alarming’ levels and a recent poll disclosed that 31 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds believed it acceptable to assault Jews because of the Gaza conflict. . . .
‘Islamo-Gauchisme’ is now de rigueur among the far-left. Another LFI MP [LFI is Melenchon’s party], Nathalie Oziol, stated earlier this year that it was wrong to blame the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in 2020 on ‘a Muslim fanatic’. Rather, it was an issue of ‘resources, hierarchy, and how the government views national education.’
Bardella’s ascent is a complete mystery.