Jordan Bardella: Make France Great Again next year?
Brace yourselves.
The April cover of Paris Match showed Jordan Bardella, 30, holding the hand of Maria Carolina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, 22, over the rocks of a Corsican beach. The magazine, owned by Bernard Arnault, called it “courtly love, 21st-century style.” It noted, in the same paragraph, that the princess had been raised in Paris, Rome and Monte Carlo, and that her companion (leader of the Rassemblement National, the largest far-right party in France) had been born in a council flat in Saint-Denis.
Two months earlier, Bardella had been quietly received in Paris by Germany’s ambassador, Stephan Steinlein. The meeting only surfaced in May, after the AFP broke the news.
Bardella has cited Giorgia Meloni as his model. He has shaken hands with Nigel Farage in London. He has met the US ambassador, Charles Kushner, with Marine Le Pen. He has been to Israel. The far right is being made presentable. The presentable are doing the work.
On 12 May, the New York Times reported that Emmanuel Macron had proposed his own chief of staff, Emmanuel Moulin, as the next president of the Banque de France. In February, his former budget minister Amélie de Montchalin had been installed at the Cour des comptes. Last year, Macron’s earliest political backer, Richard Ferrand (who has no legal training) was confirmed as head of the Constitutional Council by a single vote in parliament.
Bardella, predictably, denounced the “lockdown of our institutions.” Le Pen, whose 2022 campaign had been kept afloat by a €10.7 million loan from a Hungarian bank close to Viktor Orbán, accused the “regime” of “all manner of ethical transgressions.” On one point they did not disagree: by 2027 the contest would be over personnel, not policy.
There is a reason for this.
Most of what passes for the rise of the French far right is a description of the centre. In a televised debate in February 2021, the interior minister Gérald Darmanin told Le Pen she had become “almost too gentle” on Islamist separatism; she replied that she had read his book “very carefully” and could “have put my name on it.”
That same spring Darmanin banned a Palestine solidarity demonstration in the north of Paris and sent 4,200 officers to break it up — a continuity, as Musab Younis observed in these pages, with the night of 17 October 1961, when Maurice Papon’s police threw the bodies of Algerian protesters into the Seine.
Three years later, Éric Ciotti (who had called the Rassemblement “the enemy of the Gaullist family for historical reasons”) led the husk of Les Républicains into an electoral alliance with it.
The grammar travels on television.
Over two decades, the industrialist Vincent Bolloré has bought up Canal+, then C8, then CNews , “Bolloré’s answer to Fox News,” in Jeremy Harding’s phrase. Then, he bought the Lagardère group, which brought him Paris Match, Le Journal du Dimanche, Hachette books, and Europe 1, where Cyril Hanouna now broadcasts.
In November 2022, on C8, Hanouna called the France Insoumise deputy Louis Boyard “un abruti, une merde, un tocard.” (Translation: “a moron, a loser, a nobody.”)
The €3.5 million fine the regulator imposed was upheld by the Conseil d’État in July 2024. In March 2023, the same programme let a guest accuse public figures by name of cocaine trafficking, paedophilia and the consumption of “adrenochrome”: the QAnon import about ageing on the blood of children.
Macron, who is said to loathe the project, met Bolloré at the end of his first term and reportedly told him: you’re buying up everything.
On 13 May, Politico reported that Friedrich Merz’s CDU had been pushing legislation through the European Parliament with Bardella’s group. The conversion is two-way.
On 6 April 2026, after sixteen years, Viktor Orbán lost the Hungarian election by a landslide. Jean-Yves Camus, the French specialist on the European far right, said of the Rassemblement: “I would love for my country that they can learn a lesson… But I fear they cannot. They do not have the imagination.”
The discomfiting question is whether anyone else has had it either.
The 2027 ballot will not produce a regime. It will name one.
In my estimation, next year will be decisive for France.
Two books:
Didier Fassin, La force de l’ordre. Une anthropologie de la police des quartiers (Seuil, 2011) — an ethnography of the French anti-crime brigades, written before any of the present settlement was on a magazine cover. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Penguin, 2017) — defines the thing by anti-pluralism, not by anti-elitism. Read together they explain why French centrism keeps mistaking the disease for the cure.
A film to sit with:
Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), from Lampedusa’s novel. The Bourbon-Two Sicilies kingdom (Maria Carolina’s house) is collapsing into the new Italian state. Tancredi, the young opportunist, joins Garibaldi’s reds and tells his uncle the line that every reader of the novel remembers: Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’è, bisogna che tutto cambi. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
A figure:
In a poll released on 12 May 2026, the centre-right Édouard Philippe led Bardella 52 to 48 in a hypothetical second round — the first month in many in which Bardella has not been the front-runner. The same Philippe had dinner with Marine Le Pen in July 2024; Le Monde reported that the dinner “scandalised part of the presidential camp.” Not all of it.
Sources:
1. Hugh Schofield, “French far-right leader romantically linked to Italian princess,” BBC News, 9 April 2026.
2. Marion Solletty and Sarah Paillou, “Bardella’s next dream: A Franco-German reset,” Politico Europe, 13 May 2026.
3. Mark Landler, “Is France’s Centrist Leader Trying to Weatherproof It From the Far Right?,” New York Times, 12 May 2026.
4. Mark Landler, “Orbán’s Defeat Punctures Europe’s Far Right, but Also Offers It a Road Map,” New York Times, 16 April 2026.
5. Musab Younis, “Risky Elements,” London Review of Books, 20 May 2021.
6. Didier Fassin, “Macron’s War,” London Review of Books, 4 July 2019.
7. Jeremy Harding, “Macron en feu,” London Review of Books, 12 June 2024.
8. Jeremy Harding, “Occluded Fronts,” London Review of Books, 1 July 2024.
9. Antonia Hitchens, “Diary: At CPAC,” London Review of Books, 20 March 2025.
10. Le Monde with AFP, “Insultes de Cyril Hanouna contre le député LFI Louis Boyard : l’amende record de 3,5 millions d’euros pour C8 maintenue par le Conseil d’État,” 10 July 2024.