French Far-Right Leader Eyes Power After Hailing (anti) Immigration ‘Victory’; Le Pen Announces Jordan Bardella as Prime Minister Candidate if NR Wins Election
An IMGW News Report
Born in 1995 to Italian immigrants, anti-immigration hardliner Jordan Bardella rapidly ascended in politics. At 17, he joined Marine Le Pen’s party and quickly moved up the ranks. By 23, he led the party’s list in the 2019 European elections. In November 2022, Bardella became president of the RN, succeeding Le Pen, and has played a significant role in the party’s strategy, utilising social media platforms like TikTok to reach younger audiences.
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has just announced that Jordan Bardella will be appointed prime minister if the National Rally (RN) wins the upcoming parliamentary election. This announcement follows French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to dissolve the National Assembly and call for a snap election.
“I’ve always told the French people that for months Bardella and I have been working as an executive couple in order to fulfil at best the duties invested in them by the French people,” Le Pen stated.
“Le Pen’s party no longer calls for leaving the EU or the euro but argues for transforming the union from within to hand power back to nation-states on everything from migration to energy policy.”
The far-right party’s campaign focuses on limiting the free movement of migrants through national border controls and reducing EU climate regulations, which resonates with a substantial portion of the French electorate.
Public concern about a surge in the number of asylum-seekers coming to Europe is driving voters into the hands of anti-immigration populists across the EU, forcing governments run by mainstream parties to take ever more drastic measures to reduce numbers.
Among French parties, the RN was anticipated to come out on top in European elections as it did in 2014 and 2019, but this time with 30% of the vote, well ahead of Macron’s centrist alliance on 18%, according to a December poll by Ifop.
Macron’s Immigration Bill
In December 2023, speaking to the Financial Times, Bardella spoke after Macron salvaged the long-promised immigration bill by compromising with the right to make it harder on foreigners. The bill will facilitate removals and create migration quotas, but it includes a business-friendly move to give work permits to undocumented people working in sectors with labour shortages. The RN supported it after denouncing earlier versions as too lax.
Bardella said the law set a precedent because it treated French people differently from foreigners — whether in the country legally or illegally — in terms of access to welfare and housing benefits. He also boasted of several other RN policies in the law.
Establishing a “national preference” system where citizens are favoured over foreigners for access to social housing, public sector jobs, and other government services has been the centrepiece of the far-right programme for decades. If elected, the RN would hold a referendum to revise the constitution to make it compatible with “national preference.”
Since it was approved, Macron’s immigration reform has been roundly criticised by left-wing politicians, NGOs, and labour unions as a capitulation to the xenophobic ideas of the far-right.
Macron denied he had ceded any ideological ground to the far right and called the new law “a defeat for the Rassemblement National” that would fix longstanding problems in the asylum system and make removals easier, in what he called a “necessary shield.”
“If we don’t want the Rassemblement National and its ideas to take over, we have to deal with the problems that feed them,” Macron argued during a TV interview on France 5 in December 2023.
RN’s Popularity and Strategy
While it remains to be seen whether the narrative will match political action if Le Pen is in power, opinion polls indicate that Le Pen’s efforts to “detoxify” the party her father founded by shedding its reputation for racism and antisemitism have mainly paid off.
Le Pen and Bardella now rank third and fourth in the rankings of the most popular French political figures. For the first time in a decade of polling by Le Monde, more people now see the RN as a potential party of government than as an opposition group.
When elected in 2017 and again when re-elected last year, Macron promised that his mission was to ensure that voters “no longer have any reason to vote for the extremes.”
“I think we could win an absolute majority, and we would look for allies if we were just short,” said Le Pen. Such a scenario is not what pollsters predict if early elections were called, although the RN is expected to make gains and Macron’s party to lose seats.
Le Pen’s party no longer calls for leaving the EU or the euro but argues for transforming the union from within to hand power back to nation-states on everything from migration to energy policy. However, this stance would put Paris at loggerheads with its partners and contravene vast swathes of EU law.
For example, on asylum, the RN wants to repudiate France’s international and EU obligations to stop taking asylum applications within the country and force people to apply in or near their home countries.
During the campaign, Bardella plans to run on an anti-Brussels line that blames EU policies for rising food and energy prices, “out of control” immigration, and what he calls “punitive ecology” measures dealing with climate change.
Bardella pointed to last year’s far-right victory in the Netherlands and the prospect of a repeat in Austria next year to hail “the arrival of a people’s Europe… of people who share our fundamental views: the desire to strengthen the power of states, to protect ourselves from immigration and to defend our identity.”
Bardella also expressed confidence in his party’s national election prospects, with Le Pen expected to run for president for a fourth time: “It is not a question of if we will come to power, but when.”
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