Seven months ahead of France’s 2027 presidential election, the country’s hard-right National Rally (RN) is facing a major credibility crisis, triggered by a bombshell investigative report alleging that 31-year-old RN party president Jordan Bardella made virulent antisemitic comments as a teenage activist a decade ago.
Investigative left-wing outlet Mediapart published the findings of what it describes as a months-long probe into dozens of private written conversations Bardella is said to have held in 2013, when he was 17 to 18 years old. The outlet claims the conversations, which include blatant antisemitic tropes — such as claims that “All the banks are owned by Jews” and that Jews seek to establish a global order controlled by Israel — have been independently verified through a broad documentary cache and corroborated by witness testimony. Notably, Mediapart has not released screenshot evidence of the alleged remarks, a point seized on by the RN to discredit the report.
Bardella, who is widely expected to become France’s prime minister if RN presidential candidate Marine Le Pen wins the upcoming election, has vehemently denied all allegations, labeling them a fabricated political hit job designed to destroy his career and derail the RN’s growing momentum ahead of the vote. In an interview with CNews, Bardella confirmed he had already instructed his legal team to file a libel lawsuit against Mediapart. “Everything is being done to destabilize our campaign,” he stated. “Either Mediapart is running this operation on its own, or it is being manipulated by parties with a vested interest in taking us down.”
Le Pen, who currently holds a commanding lead in pre-election polling, has issued unwavering support for Bardella, echoing his claim that the alleged remarks are a forged dirty trick. “These alleged comments seem so out of character and absurd that they can only be a forgery — one of those underhanded tactics Mediapart seems to specialize in,” Le Pen said.
Recent polling from Toluna-Harris has underscored just how threatening the RN’s rise is to France’s traditional political establishment. The survey shows Le Pen would secure 35-36% of the vote in the multi-candidate first round of voting, and go on to win the second round run-off by overwhelming margins against every likely rival: she would beat radical left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon 69% to 31%, and defeat top centrist contender Edouard Philippe 57% to 43%. The RN received another political boost just days before the report dropped, when partial Senate election results gave the party enough seats to form its own official parliamentary group for the first time in the party’s history.
Under Le Pen’s leadership, the RN has worked for decades to detoxify its public image and distance itself from the openly antisemitic roots of the party founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Just last year, Bardella became the first senior RN figure to be invited to an antisemitism conference in Israel, and the party has positioned itself as a opponent of militant Islam, even framing itself as a “shield for the Jewish community” in France. Mediapart argues that the alleged Bardella comments reveal that old antisemitic currents have never truly been removed from the party, only covered up for political convenience.
The report has sparked immediate outcry across the French political spectrum. Left-wing politicians have already called for Bardella to step down from his leadership post, while Yonathan Arfi, head of the French Jewish umbrella organization Crif, said the allegations demonstrate the fundamental limits of the RN’s so-called detoxification effort. However, RN deputy Jean-Philippe Tanguy has pushed back against the claims, arguing that the allegations originate from a group of disaffected, expelled party members who were purged by Le Pen years ago specifically for their antisemitic views. “From what we know, these allegations come from the very antisemitic faction that Marine Le Pen bravely purged from the party,” Tanguy explained. “At the start of the 2010s, this group was large and organized, but they were defeated, and they have held a grudge against us ever since.”