Marine Le Pen's foster son This is the new pop star of the French right who could soon succeed Macron

While Marine Le Pen is fighting for her political existence in court, she has long been overshadowed by her foster son Jordan Bardella. Who is the man who could become France's first right-wing populist president?

France is facing an extraordinary presidential election campaign this year. It starts with the fact that the favorite in the polls, the right-wing populist party leader Jordan Bardella, does not even know whether he will run at all.

That depends on whether his political foster mother Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National (RN) parliamentary group, gives him the go-ahead.

She is actually the declared candidate of her party. It would be the fourth time that she has run for the highest state office - and the ninth time that the Le Pen family has been represented in the election campaign, if the candidacies of her far-right father Jean-Marie Le Pen are included.

However, as Marine Le Pen was sentenced to prison and a fine for embezzling EU funds and banned from standing for election, her only hope at the moment is that the judges of the second instance will acquit her. The appeal process began on Tuesday. If she is not acquitted, Bardella will be allowed to run for office in her place. She has already pledged to do so, even if she still has to go to the Court of Cassation.

Elections will be held in France in April 2027, but anyone who wants to stand a serious chance will have to campaign hard this year. The current president, Emmanuel Macron, will not be allowed to run again at the end of his second term in office.

In the current center-right government camp, two former prime ministers in particular are considered to have a chance: Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal. In the conservative camp, former Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau and the leader of the Republican parliamentary group Laurent Wauquiez are the main contenders. On the left, socialist party leader Olivier Faure and MEP Raphaël Glucksmann are the favorites.

Origin as capital

The 30-year-old Bardella has long since overtaken Le Pen in the popularity stakes. According to current polls, Bardella would also win the run-off, regardless of which candidate he faces. Such polls a year and a half before the election are not particularly meaningful as long as the other candidates have not yet sorted themselves out. But they send shivers down the spines of some of Bardella's political opponents.

Jordan Bardella grew up in the Seine-Saint-Denis department in Greater Paris - one of the poorest areas in France. His home is characterized by high-rise housing estates and a particularly high number of people with a migrant background. Bardella's own family history is also characterized by immigration: his mother came to France as an Italian in the 1960s, his father has French, Italian and Algerian roots.

Bardella uses this background specifically for his political narrative. When he talks about the banlieues, he comes across as credible because he claims to have experienced them himself. He describes his youth as an everyday life between drug dealing and violence around his apartment block.

In his speeches, Bardella often focuses on his mother: a kindergarten helper who raised him alone and had hardly any money left at the end of the month. This story resonates with the audience. It fits in with the image of the up-and-comer from a humble background.

Bardella tells another side of his youth less often. His father ran a medium-sized company and Bardella regularly spent weekends with him. The media report on vacation trips, a car he received as a gift and a school route that took him to a private Catholic school rather than a local state grammar school. Details that rarely feature in his accounts, as they do not fit in with the image of the social underdog.

Political change of direction at a young age

Former classmates describe Bardella as a well-integrated teenager in a multicultural environment. At times, he is even said to have volunteered to give French lessons to migrants. This made his joining the Front National at the age of 17 all the more surprising.

After that, everything happened quickly. Bardella became a close confidant of Marine Le Pen, rose rapidly within the party and became her political protégé. It probably also helped that he quickly forged private ties with close confidants of Le Pen. The French tabloid reported that he had a relationship with her niece Nolwenn Olivier.

Le Pen recognizes early on how valuable his young age and background are for the party's strategy. Bardella himself says that Le Pen awakened his enthusiasm for politics and his passion for France.

He became party spokesman in 2017 at the age of 22 and dropped out of university. Two years later, he leads the party into the European elections as the lead candidate - and narrowly beats President Macron's camp. He took over the party presidency in 2022.

Today, Bardella stands for the modernized, less shrill Rassemblement National. In terms of content, however, he remains tough: he calls for a strong state, an uncompromising security policy and warns against migration and EU decisions from Brussels. His message is that France is losing its control, its identity and its sovereignty.

On the road nationwide with new book

Bardella's presidential campaign has long been in full swing, even if his campaign appointments have so far officially only been book signings for his latest book. And even if his candidacy depends on the outcome of the trial against Le Pen.

His book entitled "What the French want" was published by Fayard, which is part of the empire of billionaire Vincent Bolloré. The latter invests heavily in paving the way to power for French right-wing populists.

Bardella's first book was also published by Fayard - a 324-page autobiography covering 29 years of his life at the time. On the cover of the second book, he is wearing a suit and tie and sitting at a dignified desk. There are often long queues at his book launches across the country - which appear even longer than they really are in the time-lapse videos produced by his PR team.

His political foster mother Marine Le Pen gets away with a brief paragraph in the book - another sign that Bardella is increasingly emancipating himself from her. He is therefore practising the balancing act of demonstrating his loyalty to Le Pen on the one hand and preparing his own candidacy on the other.

His main strategy here is to avoid causing any political offense and to cultivate the image of an up-and-coming political star. In his own words, his former communications consultant Pascal Humeau had set himself the goal of "turning an empty shell into a likeable fascist".

2.3 million followers on Tiktok

On Tiktok, where Bardella - atypically in this environment - usually appears in a suit, he now has 2.3 million followers. They get to see a video in which his former primary school teacher proudly announces that she always knew she was teaching "a future president".

In terms of content, Bardella has remained remarkably vague so far. "He has a real talent for disguising the fact that he belongs to the extreme right," judges the newspaper Libération. He embodies what Le Pen has been doing for years: the "demonization" of the party founded by her far-right, anti-Semitic father Jean-Marie Le Pen, which was then still called the Front National.

It seems an irony of fate that the success of her concept is that Le Pen will ultimately have to see that it is not her but her political pupil who could reap the rewards.

Political earthquake for Europe

Meanwhile, Bardella continues to "demonize" in a targeted manner. In March 2025, he traveled to Israel and visited the Yad Vashem Shoah memorial - as a representative of a party whose founder still dismissed the Nazi gas chambers as a "detail of history".

But the RN has long had other enemy images, primarily Muslim migrants. Immigrants and the EU are welcome scapegoats for Bardella, whom he blames for numerous grievances. He also occasionally alludes to the far-right conspiracy theory of an allegedly imminent "population exchange" in Europe.

Should Bardella actually become the next French president, it would be a political earthquake for Europe and would probably throw the friendship between France and Germany, the continent's most powerful countries, to the winds.

But the presidential election is still a year and a half away. Neither the right-wing populists nor the other blocs have decided who will run. If Bardella remains in the fast lane, he will be a force to be reckoned with.

With material from the Keystone-SDA news agency