Jordan Bardella, rising star of French far-right, is the son of immigrants

France is going to crucial parliamentary elections on Sunday, with the leftist New Popular Front facing off against the country’s far-right alliance led by Jordan Bardella, who took over the mantle of his RN party from France’s poster-lady of anti-migrant sentiments, Marine Le Pen.

But ironically, Bardella’s strident anti-migrant stance is a contradiction to his own roots – he is the son of Italian and Algerian immigrants.

Le Pen's far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National: RN), which Bardella now leads, won a stunning 34 percent in the first round of voting last week.

Now Bardella’s biggest rivals are in the leftist alliance, which says that it aims to protect the country’s revolutionary democratic values, including migrant protection measures against Bardella’s “neo-fascist” party and its allies.

The leftist alliance received 28 percent while President Emmanuel Macron’s centrists declined to 20 percent in a shocking setback.

Analysts point out that if the far-right National Rally had managed to grab power earlier—Le Pen had unsuccessfully contested for presidency thrice—the 28-year-old Bardella possibly might not have become a French citizen due to the party’s anti-migrant restrictions.

In fact, Bardella could even become the prime minister with a good showing in Sunday’s second round.

“It’s actually a taboo at the National Rally to speak of Jordan Bardella’s immigrant background,” says Yasser Louati, a French political analyst and the head of the Committee for Justice & Liberties (CJL), a human rights organisation.

“He was reminded a couple of years ago when he said, ‘French people must have French names’. Well, Jordan is not necessarily French, being a foreign first name, so he was caught on that,” Louati tells TRT World.

“He is a descendant of an Algerian immigrant. We always see these patterns of people forgetting where they came from and being more royalist than the king himself,” he adds.

Bardella claims that immigration and the EU threaten the very “soul of France”, where one-fourth of the population has migrant ancestry. According to Bardella, immigrants like his grandparents make France face “annihilation”, putting the country’s “French identity and sovereignty” at stake.

As a result, Bardella pledges to take measures like abolishing the birthright to citizenship, a fundamental right that dates back to the 1789 French Revolution.

Bardella, whose ancestry includes at least one Muslim parent, also has harsh words about the presence of people who practice Islam.

He called towns and suburbs with Muslim majority as “Islamic Republic”, describing those areas as “lost areas of the French Republic”. Muslim presence in France gave him “the pain of becoming a foreigner in your own country,” he said in an interview.

What is Bardella’s ethnicity?

Bardella’s father, Olivier Bardella, was born to a family of Italian and Algerian descent in the late 1960s, while his mother, Luisa Bertelli-Mota, was of Italian origin.

Bardella’s maternal side came to France from Italy in the 1960s. His paternal grandfather, a carpenter-cabinetmaker, was also an Italian from the city of Lazio, who married the daughter of an Algerian migrant father, a construction worker.

Bardella’s paternal grandfather went to Morocco after he divorced his half-Algerian wife, married a Moroccan woman and converted to Islam, according to a recent investigation.

As a result, Bardella has a strong non-French ancestry in terms of his ethnicity. But this is also not something Bardella has tried to hide.

"Venu d'ailleurs, devenu d'ici," ("From elsewhere, from here now"), he said at his rallies, referring to himself as "75% Italian".

Political identity

Bardella, an agnostic, grew up in mixed circumstances due to his parents’ separation.

According to a recent Le Monde investigation, he spent some of his childhood in his father’s house in the wealthier suburb of Montmorency but also grew up in a local council tower block in modest conditions where he was born.

In order to appeal to a broad electorate, critics say, Bardella wants to focus on his suburban upbringing, not his time with his wealthy father, showing that he is a successful product of the French integration project – rising from Paris’s banlieues to the ruling class of politics.

Bardella did not finish his university education to focus on his political career, joining the RN in 2012 when he was just 16, "more for Marine Le Pen than for the National Front", which was the previous banner of the far-right party under its founding father Jean-Marie Le Pen, the father of Marine Le Pen.

Many credit Marine Le Pen with making her father’s far-right party more acceptable to large parts of French society, including some people of immigrant origin like Bardella.

While the party was a furious critic of EU policies, from enlargement to the eurozone and the Ukraine war, Marine Le Pen has recently softened many of these stances.

Bardella describes his political views as close to those of his mentor, Le Pen: "She instilled in me a passion for our wonderful people." Some also see him as “the puppet” of Marine Le Pen.

“Jordan Bardella is the creation of Marine Le Pen,” said Cécile Alduy, a professor of French politics and literature at Stanford University and an expert on the far right, seeing him as “extremely loyal” to Marine Le Pen.

Bardella has formed strong personal ties with the Le Pen family, which has founded and ruled the far-right party for a half-century, having a romantic relationship with Nolwenn Olivier, the daughter of Marie-Caroline Le Pen, the elder sister of Marine Le Pen.

“Jordan Bardella as a political figure is an empty shell. There is no track record of him running for an election aside from pure communication stances,” says Louati, the French analyst, adding that he was coached by political experts to create an appealing public image for him.

“There is absolutely nothing tangible, politically speaking. He is a pure media product, which further shows the weakness of our political landscape in which money can manufacture politicians,” he says.

But French society, from its farmers to urban populations, now has too many problems, and it is desperate “for a radical change,” said Alduy. She added that they see Bardella, who has “a clean slate and comes with no baggage of the past,” as a possible response to their growing debacle.

Overall, Louati is not surprised by Bardella’s rise after Macron, who also rose in political ranks thanks to his connections in the media and finance world.

“Jordan Bardella is another example of how in the French democracy, money and media can create a public figure, turning him into a contender for a state position,” he says.