Will Bardella, someday, replace Marine Le Pen as the presidential candidate of the hard right in France? He might just pull it off.
Even at the top of the right-wing National Rally in France, the great replacement of the autochthonous French seems unstoppable. On the hustings for the European elections, its successful young leader, Jordan Bardella, proudly presents himself as “a Frenchman of mixed heritage.”
The polls predict a landslide for his party Rassemblement National (RN) on June 9th. At around 30 percent of the vote, RN is deemed far ahead of its nearest rival, a relatively unknown member of president Emmanuel Macron’s party. This lady, Valérie Hayer, could hope for 19 percent of the vote at best. If the polls are proved right, the nationalist Right will sweep the board in France, as the RN’s competitor somewhat further to the right, Reconquête, is credited with at least 6 percent of the vote.
About fifteen French parties have put forward candidates for the Parliament in Strasbourg where all 27 member states of the European Union are represented. Voting takes places between June 6th and 9th. (READ MORE from René ter Steege: Poles Vote on Immigration While Other Europeans Suffer)
It can be argued, rightly, that the French and other Europeans care little about the European Parliament, presented as a coffee klatch and besmirched by corruption scandals and influence-peddling by Russia.
Nonetheless, the vote is seen in France as a dress rehearsal for presidential elections in 2027. Marine Le Pen is widely expected to run again, after three failed attempts. A victory in June for her protégé Jordan Bardella would stand her in good stead to finally succeed.
Second on Mr. Bardella’s electoral list is yet another politician with foreign roots. Malika Sorel, the daughter of Algerian immigrants, is a conservative but hitherto politically unattached intellectual said to have joined Mr. Bardella’s team after president Macron had turned her down for a government post.
The immigrant background of both politicians undermines the well-worn reproach of the Left that the National Rally is inherently “racist,” bent on ridding France of foreigners. In reality, France has, albeit not always flawlessly, mostly welcomed immigrants willing to embrace the country. But during the last four decades, the once neutral word immigration has in French acquired a negative connotation, linked with self-chosen apartheid by often Islamic migrants and their offspring who have unleashed a wave of crime and terror on the country.
Jordan Bardella had witnessed this at first hand in 2005, when, aged nine, he lived with his mother Luisa, born in the Italian city of Turin, in a council flat in the drab Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. There, too, youngsters mostly of Arab and African origin created havoc in the first national “uprising” which surpassed itself in the summer of last year, creating an atmosphere of insurrection on a national scale.
Later, Bardella, born in 1995 in the suburb of Drancy, would refer to the rioting around his modest apartment building as his “first political memory.” At the time, his mother eked out a meager living as an educational assistant in nursery schools, witnessing at first hand the linked phenomena of white flight and massive non-Western immigration to the northern suburbs of Paris.
