We Need to Talk about Jordan (2!)

Friends, this website has been bugging all day and maybe due to loaded media, editing it has been impossible. Sorry to double-spam your inboxes, but the errors were impossible to fix without just redoing the whole damn thing. I think our Jordan is worth it, though. So without further ado, here we go again.

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They say that whatever happens in America comes to France ten years later. So the countdown clock that began in 2015 with America’s golden escalator descent into hell should be buzzing in my adopted country now.

We appear to be on schedule. A week ago, a reputable poll gave the far-right National Rally’s Jordan Bardella a massive lead in the 2027 presidential election. The strapping 30-year-old came in at 35-44% in the first round, almost doubling the next lowest candidate. In the second round, which takes place between the last two candidates standing, he would beat any of his presumed rivals, left, right, or center.

I know I have some French and France-expert readers (love you guys), but I’m going to assume that most of you don’t know a ton about the hunky honky being groomed to take Marine Le Pen’s place, should she lose next summer’s appeal of her embezzlement conviction and remain ineligible to stand for election. With Russia inching ever closer to open hot war with EU countries, the person who is elected to lead the body’s only nuclear nation is globally consequential, even if that person ends up being a highly punchable TikTok star. Now is the time to brush up. So here are some fun, and not so fun, facts, about Bardella you all should know:

1. He Is in Food Company

An even louder sign than the polls that Bardella’s moment has arrived came last week, when he was egged and flour-bombed on two separate occasions. Everyone whines about a lack of civility in the gesture, but this is a time-tested French political rite of passage. Nicolas Sarkozy, Socialist Party honcho Ségolène Royal, and former Prime Minister Alain Juppé have all been cream pied; Marine Le Pen, Emmanuel Macron and former presidential candidate Eric Zemmour have been egged; former president François Hollande, and former Prime Ministers Manuel Valls and François Fillon have been flour bombed. To the best of my knowledge, Bardella is the only one to get a two-fer in the same week.

2. He Has Virtually No Qualifications

Raised by a single mom in a grim high-rise in a working-class suburb, Bardella applied but couldn’t get into the elite university Sciences Po, and dropped out of the Sorbonne. Not all French presidents have been front row kids like Macron, but where you went to high school, let alone uni, and even your class ranking, count for a lot in this country. Nicolas Sarkozy is the only Fifth Republic president not to have a diploma from one of the elite grands écoles, but he did have a law degree. Bardella would be the only one never to have finished college, and never to have worked outside of party politics.

Bardella isn’t a lovable dumb hick à l’américain—he’s quite slick and well-spoken—but his lack of pedigree is a very big change for a présidentiable. There is an anti-elite wind blowing hard in France right now; it remains to be seen just how gusty it will end up.

3. He Is a Marketing Savant

There have been presidents with the common touch before. Jacques Chirac’s bonhomie was legendary. François Hollande campaigned on being président normal. Nicolas Sarkozy loved billionaires, but his thirst and vulgarity were plebeian coded. All of that said, compared to the US, there is still a higher expectation of dignity, elegance and remove for French holders of the top job. Attempts to make “Pols: They’re Just Like Us!” press coverage, with soft-focus vacation pics and anecdotes of candidates’ favorite dishes, usually come off as awkward and staged, and nobody really buys it. Even Marine Le Pen hid her obsession with (suspiciously African!) Bengal and Somali cats behind a private Instagram account that I would kill to access.

So what to make of Bardella’s positively lit TikTok account, with 2.2 million followers and 76 million likes? One of his breakout vids showed him in distressed jeans and a blazer prepping for a TV spot jawing down Haribo gummies, explaining mid-chaw how he benefits from the sugar rush. Eating junk food behind the scenes is now his brand, scoring far better than his straightforward political content, which is comparatively scant for someone so ambitious. Bardella’s “Me 24/7,” a pretend-bashful montage of compulsive snacking, in which he pointedly repeats “I’m hungry,” is a work of genius. French people are sick of reading about state functionaries dining out on taxpayer funded lobster. Pedestrian, shitty industrial candy is refreshing, and mothers of teenage boys across the spectrum feel their uteruses quake when they see a bright eyed manchild desperate for his goûter.

4. The “Ideal Son in Law” Is in Bed with the Worst People Imaginable.

Bardella’s political conversion was explained by his good pal Pierre Gentillet, a Putin-friendly anti-vax TV lawyer, as having been caused by the 2005 riots in the northern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. It was then that the very young Bardella decided there could be no reconciliation between France and its immigrant working class. According to Franc Tireur, Bardella’s red pilling continued via the output of the Franco-Swiss Holocaust denier Alain Soral, who was just this September condemned to a year in jail for pandemic-era incitement to racial violence, urging people to pick up guns to fight a list of Jewish public health officials.

At 16, Bardella joined the National Front, as the Le Pens’ National Rally party was then known. He said it was for love of Marine more than the party’s platform, but just two years later, he was elected departmental secretary of the party and became the youngest ever regional counselor in Île-de-France. Around that time, he started dating Kerridwen Chatillon, daughter of Frédéric Chatillon, a former president of the infamous Groupe Union Défense (GUD), a fascist student paramilitary group that was finally formally disbanded last year for doxing and violent gay bashing. Chatillon père, a law school buddy of Marine Le Pen’s, was recently convicted of fraud and misuse of assets to finance the National Rally. The case is being appealed, though maybe you’ve also heard of him from the Panama Papers, where he was alleged to front a money laundering network extending to Hong Kong, Singapore and the British Virgin Islands. Chatillon has denied those allegations too.

Bardella’s taste for well-connected ladies with extremely bréton first names continued with his next paramour, Marine Le Pen’s niece Nolwenn Olivier. He insists he was still single when Le Pen picked him to head the list of National Rally candidates for European Parliament in 2019, which he won. He was not, however, when Marine appointed him as party president in 2022. Olivier was a sore spot for someone whose brand is being self-made, so absolutely no vacation selfies from that lovers’ trip to Amalfi were forthcoming, “to play the man of the people card,” wrote L’Express.

None of these fashy trophies compare to Bardella’s latest prize, the industrialist turned media baron Vincent Bolloré, France’s Rupert Murdoch. In acquiring the publishing house Fayard, Bolloré has turned it into the house organ for far-right ideologues like Zemmour, trad-Cath amusement park impresario Philippe de Villiers, and Bardella, not once but twice in just under two years. Bolloré forked over three quarter of a million euros in advances for Bardella’s first two books, Ce que je cherche (What I’m looking for) and Ce que veulent les Français (What the French want). This is a staggering sum when you consider that, as Mediapart pointed out, two thirds of book advances in France are less than €3000. Bolloré’s vertical media integration—he also owns major national TV and radio networks, glossy national weeklies and a newspaper—means max promotional power and sales, and Bardella’s books have moved a lot of copies. Rollouts have included signing sessions all over the country that double as political rallies that don’t cost the National Rally a centime. Tidy!

5. He Is Totally Straight, You Guys.

Bardella’s tender age and fast rise often has him compared to another precocious apple-cheeked politico, Gabriel Attal. Attal, who is openly gay, was briefly France’s youngest Prime Minister, under Emmanuel Macron, and he is among the ones to watch for the upcoming presidential election. Because both he and Bardella are in national party leadership, there have been several high-profile, acrimonious televised debates between the two. I’ve watched a few, and while I’m admittedly biased, I don’t think Bardella is a master of the format. The RN’s policy proposals have always been chaotic, economically incoherent populist slop, but Bardella should still be able to summarize them. He also loses his cool too much, though that can make some right wing people horny, so maybe it’s a toss-up.

I bring Bardella’s sexuality up in this context not to laud political debates, but to celebrate the magic of the internet. Somewhere along the unfurling of this milennial head-to-head, TikTok decided to ship the two. In doing so it unleashed its entire arsenal of absurdity: smash cuts of pretend eye contact set to slow jams, hilariously shitty pastiches of supposed flirtation, explainers delineating telltale signs.

Bardella may be a TikTok superstar but not even he commands the chaos of that platform. It had gotten so out of hand by this summer that he decided he had to vociferously proclaim his heterosexuality on the national TV channel M6. The platform’s users can’t seem to decide between #bardattal or #bardellattal but both are still thriving.

6. He Has His Own Legal Problems

For years, the National Rally’s slogan was tous pourris, or “they’re all rotten,” referring to the mainstream, institutional political parties. They loved to rail about the European Union as an antidemocratic money pit, holding itself above the Brussels swamp. But then oops, investigations have shown the party and many of its actors to be exceptionally corrupt, illegally leaching off the same Brussels tit they never stop denouncing. Marine Le Pen’s EU embezzlement case ensnared eight other National Rally MEPs, and twelve parliamentary assistants were convicted of receiving stolen funds. The party itself was convicted as a legal entity.

Jordan Bardella was an EU parliamentary assistant during that time, though he escaped that affair. But he is now the subject of three new allegations involving over €4.5 million of EU money. Two of them are brand new, and at the criminal complaint stage; one of them is a real deal affair.

This March, the anti-corruption association Adelibe accused Bardella of holding two jobs at once: as an EU parliamentary assistant, for four months, and as an aide to Florian Philippot, then the VP of the National Front. This is a violation of EU rules. Though Bardella collected an EU salary, he was alleged never to have shown up for the job, and to have doctored evidence, including personal diaries and research dossiers, to cover it up. The investigation is still under seal but if it advances to trial, Bardella faces up to ten years in jail, fines of up to €1 million and five years of ineligibility, just like Marine.

On the EU level, the National Rally, as part of the entire far right parliamentary group, is under yet another investigation for misappropriated funds. The party’s headquarters were raided this July; documents, servers and correspondence were seized. Predictably, Bardella has claimed it’s a smear campaign.

Lastly, just two days ago, the anti-corruption agency AC !! filed a complaint that Bardella paid a PR agency for media training related to his MEP duties that actually went to sharpen him up as a Le Pen presidential surrogate during the 2022 French election. The training sessions were said to include diction courses, voice control, camera presence, smiling tips, and stress management. No matter what the fate of this brand new case, based mostly off a story in Le Canard Enchainé, turns out to be, its spoils have clearly come in handy.