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The president of France's National Rally (RN), Jordan Bardella, has announced he will take legal action for libel following a media report alleging he made antisemitic remarks as a young political activist more than a decade ago. The allegations, published by the investigative website Mediapart, have landed at a highly sensitive moment for the French hard right, less than a year before the country votes in a presidential election that polls currently suggest the party is on course to win.
Mediapart said its report was the product of "several months" of investigation and drew on what it described as "dozens of written conversations" attributed to Bardella from 2013, when he was about 17 or 18 years old. The outlet said it had "independently authenticated" the exchanges and that they formed part of "a bigger documentary base corroborated by witness statements." Notably, however, Mediapart did not publish screen-grabs of any of the alleged remarks, a decision that Bardella's camp has seized upon.
Among the statements the website attributes to the young Bardella are: "All the banks are owned by Jews"; "The Jew has to dominate other people, crush them and rob them"; and a claim that what Jews want is "a new world order dominated by Israel, with of course Jerusalem as its capital." The remarks, if genuine, would amount to blatantly antisemitic tropes of the kind that have long shadowed the French far right.
Bardella, who is 31, responded forcefully to the publication. Speaking to the television channel CNews on Monday evening, he rejected the allegations as a fabrication designed to derail his party's momentum. "Everything is going to be done to destabilise the campaign," he said, adding that either Mediapart was running the operation itself or was "being manipulated by interested parties." He confirmed that he had instructed his lawyer to sue for libel.
The RN leader characterised the report as "the beginnings of a total war" aimed at destabilising his party. Marine Le Pen, the RN's presidential candidate, publicly backed him, saying she had total confidence in him and that the alleged remarks "seem so weird that they can only be a forgery – one of those dirty tricks for which Mediapart appears to hold the secret."
The controversy arrives with just seven months remaining before France's presidential elections. Bardella is widely seen as a likely prime minister if Le Pen wins the presidency, which gives the allegations added political weight. The RN has been riding higher in pre-election polling than at any previous point in its history. The latest survey this week, conducted by Toluna-Harris, showed Le Pen emerging as a clear victor over any rival she might face in the decisive second round in May.
According to that poll, Le Pen would take between 35 and 36 percent of the vote in the multi-candidate first round. Her probable opponent in a two-way run-off would be Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the radical left, whom she would defeat overwhelmingly with 69 percent of the vote. Perhaps more striking for the political establishment, the survey indicated she would also comfortably beat the most popular centrist candidate, Edouard Philippe, by a margin of 57 percent.
The party received a further boost on Sunday when partial election results for the upper house of parliament, the Senate, produced for the first time enough seats for the RN to form an official group. That development underscores the party's steady institutional entrenchment, a process that has accelerated under Le Pen's leadership.
Since taking over the party founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen has worked hard to distance the RN from the antisemitic roots of the French far right. Last year, Bardella became the first senior figure from the party to be invited to Israel, where he attended a conference on antisemitism. The party now presents militant Islam as a pre-eminent threat – a stance it shares with many French Jews – and has even styled itself as a "shield for the Jewish community."
The alleged comments attributed to Bardella, however, cut directly against that carefully constructed image. Mediapart contends that the current of far-right thinking reflected in the remarks has never truly been eradicated but merely covered up in the party's new look. The publication is avowedly leftwing and has exposed scandals involving politicians of many different stripes over the years, which its defenders cite as evidence of its independence.
Reaction from political opponents and Jewish community leaders was swift. Leftwing politicians called on Bardella to resign. Yonathan Arfi, head of Crif, the umbrella organisation representing French Jewish communities, said the alleged comments "were an illustration of the limits of the RN's clean-up act" – a pointed suggestion that the party's rehabilitation remains incomplete.
The RN pushed back by questioning the provenance of the material. Party deputy Jean-Philippe Tanguy said the source of the allegations was disaffected former members who had been expelled years ago because of their antisemitic ideas. "From what I know, it is the antisemitic rabble that were so bravely purged by Marine Le Pen," he said, adding that at the start of the 2010s such people were numerous and well-organised but had been defeated, and that "these people have always had it in for us."
The episode raises questions that are likely to persist through the campaign. Mediapart's decision not to publish primary documents leaves room for dispute over authenticity, while the RN's insistence that the claims are a political hit job plays into its broader narrative of being targeted by hostile elites. For a party that has staked much of its recent credibility on shedding its extremist past, the allegations strike at the heart of its rebranding effort – and with Bardella positioned as a future prime minister, the stakes could hardly be higher.
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