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Jordan Bardella, the president of France's hard-right National Rally (RN), has announced he will pursue a libel action after the investigative website Mediapart published a report alleging he made antisemitic remarks as a young activist more than a decade ago. The allegations have landed at a highly sensitive moment for the party, arriving with only seven months remaining before France's presidential election, and they have injected a fresh note of volatility into a campaign the RN had been contesting with growing confidence.
According to the BBC, Mediapart described its publication as the product of "several months" of investigation into "dozens of written conversations" that Bardella is alleged to have conducted in 2013. The website said it had "independently authenticated" the exchanges, which it said emerged from "a bigger documentary base corroborated by witness statements." The outlet did not, however, release screen captures of any of the alleged remarks, a decision that has become a central point of contention in the dispute.
Among the statements attributed to Bardella when he was 17 or 18 are claims that "all the banks are owned by Jews," that "the Jew has to dominate other people, crush them and rob them," and that Jewish people seek "a new world order dominated by Israel, with of course Jerusalem as its capital." The content of the alleged remarks, if verified, would place the RN's young leader in direct conflict with the party's years-long effort to distance itself from the antisemitic currents of its past.
Bardella's response was swift and combative. In an interview with CNews television on Monday night, he characterised the publication as an attempt to sabotage his party's electoral momentum. "Everything is going to be done to destabilise the campaign," he said, suggesting that either Mediapart was orchestrating the operation itself or was being manipulated by interested parties. He confirmed that he had instructed his lawyer to sue for libel, calling the allegations a fabrication designed to destroy his political career.
Marine Le Pen, the RN's presidential candidate and the party's long-time figurehead, also rejected the claims outright. She said the alleged remarks "seem so weird that they can only be a forgery," describing them as "one of those dirty tricks for which Mediapart appears to hold the secret." Her intervention signalled that the party intends to treat the report as an attack on its entire leadership rather than on Bardella alone, and she has expressed total confidence in him.
The allegations carry particular weight because of the RN's concerted rebranding effort. Under Le Pen, who took over from her father and party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Rally has worked hard to shed the antisemitic associations of its predecessor, the National Front. 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 itself as a "shield for the Jewish community" and identifies militant Islam as a primary threat, a position it shares with many French Jews.
The report has nevertheless drawn sharp criticism from political opponents and Jewish community representatives. Left-wing politicians have called on Bardella to resign, while Yonathan Arfi, who heads the Jewish umbrella organisation Crif, said the alleged comments "were an illustration of the limits of the RN's clean-up act." The remark suggests that, for some observers, the controversy raises doubts about the durability of the party's transformation rather than merely about the behaviour of one individual.
The RN has pushed back by questioning the provenance of the material. Party deputy Jean-Philippe Tanguy said he believed the allegations originated with disaffected former members who were expelled years ago over their antisemitic views. "From what I know, it is the antisemitic rabble that were so bravely purged by Marine Le Pen," he said. He added that such figures were "numerous and well-organised" at the start of the 2010s but had been defeated, and that "these people have always had it in for us." The argument attempts to frame the report as a legacy dispute rather than evidence of a present-day problem.
Mediapart, for its part, is an avowedly left-wing publication that has exposed scandals across the political spectrum over the years. It has previously targeted politicians of various affiliations, a record that the outlet uses to rebut accusations of partisan motivation. Still, the absence of published screen captures has given the RN grounds to dispute the authenticity of the material and to cast doubt on the methodology behind the story.
The controversy unfolds against polling that has alarmed much of the French political establishment. The most recent survey, conducted by Toluna-Harris, shows Le Pen winning the multi-candidate first round of the presidential election with 35-36% of the vote, before going on to a two-way run-off. Her likely opponent in that second round, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the radical left, would be defeated by a margin of 69% to 31%. Perhaps more strikingly, the poll indicates she would also comfortably beat Edouard Philippe, the most popular centrist candidate, by 57% to 43%.
The RN received an additional boost on Sunday when partial elections for the upper house of parliament, the Senate, produced enough seats for the party to form an official group for the first time. That development gives the party a formal presence in a chamber where it has long been marginalised, and it reinforces the sense that the RN is consolidating institutional power as well as electoral support.
Taken together, the libel threat, the poll numbers and the Senate result place Bardella at the centre of a defining period for his party. If Le Pen wins next year's presidential election, the 31-year-old Bardella would probably become prime minister, making him the most prominent figure of a generation of RN politicians who came of age after the party's rebranding began. The outcome of the dispute with Mediapart may therefore shape not only his own reputation but also the credibility of the RN's claim to have broken with its past.
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