DecryptionsAt 26, the interim president of the National Rally is campaigning to take the reins of the far-right party in the fall. He dreams of a synthesis between marinism and the Zemmourian trend.
The digestion of the pig on the spit in the heavy air, by 33 ° C, Saturday June 4, plunges the militants into torpor, in the shade of the plane trees of the racecourse of Cavaillon (Vaucluse). Some 300 participants are waiting. Suddenly, the spokesperson for the Rassemblement national (RN), Laure Lavalette, shouts into the microphone: ” He’s young ! He is handsome ! » Jordan Bardella arrives, immaculate white shirt, lends himself to photos with ladies delighted to cling to the dashing interim president of the party. On stage, leaning on the desk, he strikes a pose while telling “a real horror movie” in “Wild and inhuman France”. He knows that below, his photographer shoots him.
In his service for a year, the service provider Raphaël Attal has been instructed, for three weeks, to stylize his shots. We discover Mr. Bardella as the muse of national-populism, in ultra-personalized stagings, Ray-Ban on the collar or in the darkness of a sedan. His inspiration? The series of Soazig de La Moissonnière, the official photographer of Emmanuel Macron, whom he follows closely. “He likes to have a licked com”, confirms François Paradol, his discreet chief of staff. Marine Le Pen’s dolphin is working to sculpt his image as the future titular president of the RN and to prepare his ” new era “. “The time to get in the car is coming, I will choose to drive”, he slips aside, while a party congress is to be held in the fall to entrust him with the keys, after an internal vote.
As always, Mr. Bardella slaloms between the fires and so many paradoxes. The best soldier of Marine Le Pen says he wants to continue the normalization initiated ten years ago and erase the extremism of the former National Front… but agrees easily with the ideology of Eric Zemmour – “a competitor, not an adversary” –, whose books he had read with relish. The distribution of roles with the RN presidential candidate was not only circumstantial. To him the dredge of the Zemmourian electorate with strokes of the racist theory of the “great replacement” and clichés aimed at foreigners, to Marine Le Pen the score of softening. To him again the meetings in the Var and the Vaucluse for the legislative elections, when Mme Le Pen settled rather in the Hauts-de-France.
“It was burning at the bottom of the house”
Jordan Bardella pleaded for alliances with Reconquête!, in the hope of avoiding a delegation of deputies too attached to the northern line. Without political density comparable to Le Pen, he is not the empty shell described by his detractors either: he has much more identity than Marine Le Pen, without assuming the term. In Budapest, on May 20, at the CPAC, the great rout of American conservatives, Jordan Bardella turned into a clone of Jean-Marie Le Pen by speaking on world demography and “the scramble for Europe” of Africa.
You have 60.78% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.