The uncomfortable partnership between Marine Le Pen and her protege Jordan Bardella at the top of France’s largest political party is unraveling as the presidential campaign kicks into gear.
Le Pen has reasserted her hold on the National Rally party her late father founded in 1972 since courts in July cleared her to run for the highest office . Differences over policy and style they brushed aside as she fought the fallout of an embezzlement conviction are increasingly emerging in public view.
The economic blueprint Le Pen announced Tuesday shows how the 31-year-old Bardella and his pro-business agenda have been shunted to the background behind Le Pen’s populist priorities. While her plan included a sharp deficit reduction, Le Pen called for lowering the retirement age, boosting purchasing power, taxing share buybacks and increasing taxes on multinationals.
“There are differences of opinion and style, but at the end of the day the boss is Marine Le Pen,” the party’s vice-president, Louis Aliot, said this week in an interview.
Tensions increased after a report in Mediapart that disclosed anti-Semitic comments allegedly made by Bardella in 2013 — which he has denied while taking legal action. Le Pen has backed him up publicly, but the outcry fed widespread speculation and media reports that the leak may have come from within the National Rally.
Cooling Ties
“The anti-Semitic comments episode might become a good excuse for them to further distance themselves,” said Valerie Igounet, a French historian who specializes in the far right, citing Le Pen’s efforts to clean up the party’s racist roots . “Ties between Bardella and Le Pen have clearly cooled down since summer,” she added.
A political prodigy with a knack for social media, Bardella was 26 when he became president of the party — backed by Le Pen — in 2022. While she lost to Macron that year, National Rally’s vote total increased, and in the 2024 snap elections it won the most seats in the National Assembly. She now leads in the polls with the election to succeed Emmanuel Macron six months away and has said Bardella would be her prime minister if she wins.
Before Le Pen was cleared by a Paris court to make her fourth bid for the presidency in next year’s election, though, Bardella was gearing up to lead the RN ticket . In the 16 months between the court-ordered ban on her running for office after the March 2025 embezzlement conviction and the July decision to shorten the sanction, he began to shift the party apparatus behind his free-market policy priorities.
The two have very different views on the economy, according to a person familiar with their thinking. Le Pen is developing a populist economic-policy toolkit as she seeks to soften her culture warrior brand. Her priorities lie more with workers and on boosting household spending power, said the person, who isn’t allowed to speak publicly about it. Bardella, in contrast, believes entrepreneurship and economic opportunity should drive policy.
Pension Matters
The economic blueprint Le Pen rolled out this week will do little to calm the worries over the country’s finances that have hammered French assets. The yield premium on 10-year government debt over Germany’s last week rose to the highest since the euro area debt crisis in 2011.
“It still faces the same challenge as other far-right parties in Europe: building a policy platform that is both credible and realistic,” according to a Bloomberg Economics analysis by Jean Dalbard and Antonio Barroso.
Yet, Le Pen is still seen the most credible candidate, the latest Verian poll for Le Figaro Magazine showed. In the survey conducted Sept. 27-29, 39% believe she has a clear vision for France’s future, compared with 27% for center-right rival Edouard Philippe and 18% for far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
On perhaps the most potent political question, Le Pen has long advocated a retirement age as young as 60 — Macron increased it to 64. Bardella promoted a reform of the pension system focused on the length of time worked rather than on a fixed legal age.
When Bardella was the presumptive presidential candidate, meetings with executives became a priority for the National Rally. He courted CEOs, touting tax cuts, reduced red tape and the creation of a sovereign wealth fund. Last year, he attended the yearly meeting of Medef, France’s top business lobby.
While Le Pen, who attended this year’s Medef conference, has also met with CEOs, she made a less agreeable impression. Bardella was clearly trying to impress them, while she made a point of keeping an authoritative tone and not showing she needed their help, according to four people familiar with those discussions.
“Many CEOs made a bet on Bardella,” said Bastien Brunis, a business owner and a senior member of Medef. “They thought he would listen to them more and was willing to apply their views,” he added, while noting that it has now become pointless to meet him. “The Bardella mania is over.”
Glitz and Glam
The differences extend beyond economic philosophy.
Bardella has advertised his glitzy lifestyle on social media, ruffling feathers with the old-school National Rally officials, who worry about it going down badly in the party’s working class heartlands.
He is dating an Italian princess with whom he attended swish events such as the Monaco Formula One Grand Prix. He is often seen in fancy restaurants such as Laurent, a short stroll from the Elysee palace.
At the party’s Paris headquarters, Bardella also promoted a cadre of younger allies sympathetic to his business-friendly approach.
The most high-profile recruit was Francois Durvye, a former portfolio manager who left his well-paid private sector role at Otium Capital to become his chief economic adviser.
As with Bardella, Durvye’s profile was at odds with Le Pen’s blue-collar appeal. He is a millenial from the French upper classes, a conservative Roman Catholic, with the financial savvy to help sell Bardella’s vision to business circles. He also became a symbol of the RN’s new-found willingness to embrace elites.
On the day Le Pen was cleared to run, Durvye suggested to Bardella that he should still announce he’s the candidate, according to people familiar with discussions inside the party. In fact, Le Pen decided to fire him immediately after her July court victory, even though the decision only became public in August, the people said.
And in September, Le Pen took the symbolically important decision to relaunch her bid for president from the blue collar town of Henin-Beaumont in northern France - from where she was elected to the French National Assembly. She chose affordable housing as the initial campaign theme.
While the partnership is on the rocks, divorce remains unlikely for now.
Remaining close in public would help the party appeal to mainstream conservatives who may resist Le Pen’s populist appeal.
Which is why Igounet, the far right expert scholar, says it would be risky for her to dump Bardella outright. “If she loses Bardella, there are many people who won’t vote for the party anymore,” she says. “He is a very important figure within the RN who has truly won over his electorate.”
Bardella has made a point of keeping a busy agenda and even an economic adviser of his own, Charles-Henri Gallois, who said the party leaders might split to campaign simultaneously in different cities across France.
“We can double our impact,” says Gallois, former chief financial officer for watchmaker TAG Heuer in Europe. “Since Jordan and Marine are both equally popular, it’s a win-win situation.”