Jordan Bardella Isn’t Such a Friend of Jews After All

As a young member of the Front National (today’s Rassemblement National), Jordan Bardella was an “obsessive antisemite,” according to a story published by investigative site Mediapart this Monday. “Banks are all controlled by Jews,” Bardella allegedly wrote in one message published by Mediapart. “The Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them and rob them,” read another. “A Zionist is necessarily Jewish, and deeply so.”Bardella, who was the Rassemblement National’s candidate for prime minister in 2024 and who has been president of the party since 2022, denies having written the messages, which Mediapart says date from between 2013 and 2015.“These comments are completely outrageous. They’re not mine. . . . I dispute them,” Bardella said in a television interview on Monday night, adding that his lawyers had filed a defamation lawsuit against Mediapart. “I think we’re looking at something very organized . . . which resembles a covert operation.”Bardella also claimed that the messages that he says he didn’t write, when he was around seventeen years old, weren’t from a time when he had any sort of leadership position in the party.Bardella joined Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National when he was sixteen, then became head of the Seine-Saint-Denis branch of the party in 2014, when he was nineteen.During his rise as the fresh young face of the far-right party, Bardella was feted in the media as a representative of a new version of the Front National that had shed its roots in the fascist underworld to become a party like any other, free from its racist heritage.“They present a young, cosmopolitan . . . image for the Front National,” the news channel BFMTV wrote in 2016 about a group of party activists from France’s suburbs. “Their figurehead: Jordan Bardella, regional councilor for Île-de-France [the region around Paris] at just twenty-one.”At about the same time, according to Mediapart, Bardella was swimming in a soup of late 2000s and early 2010s French “new right” ideology, which has close affiliations with fascism and classic French antisemitism.Its chief ideologue, Alain Soral, became a viral celebrity online for his syncretic analysis of French society, which wed racist, anti-immigrant ideology to a type of motley anti-Zionism based fundamentally in antisemitism, with a few anti-imperialist geopolitical positions soldered on. In the late 2000s, Soral was close with and wrote speeches for Jean-Marie Le Pen, still the party’s leader then. Soral became a member of the Front National’s central committee but left in 2009 when he was denied leadership of the party’s list for the European elections.“His analyses are correct because everything is verified by the facts,” Bardella wrote of Soral in 2013, per Mediapart. “Zionism and domination by the banks are linked (Goldman Sachs, Rothschild, Lehman Brothers. . . . ).”“I knew Bardella a little; I had some conversations with him,” Soral said in 2025. “On certain radical subjects, he wasn’t as innocent as he seems.”“Jordan watched kilometers of Soral videos and read his books,” a former “close adviser” to Bardella told Mediapart. “He became politicized partially because of it.”Marine Le Pen, the party’s candidate for the 2027 presidential election, expelled her father from the Front National in 2015 after he refused to apologize for calling the gas chambers in the Holocaust a “detail” of history that didn’t matter much then defended Marshal Philippe Pétain, the general who collaborated with the Nazis during the World War II–era occupation of France.Jean-Marie Le Pen’s expulsion was supposed to represent the culmination of this strategy of “dédiabolisation” — literally “de-demonization.” The National Rally may have been founded by at least one former member of the Waffen-SS, the message was, but Le Pen père’s expulsion was the end result of a cleanup operation by Le Pen fille to push out the embarrassing remnants who were still partial to a Roman salute every once in a while (“I’ll never forgive my decision [to expel my father], because I know that it caused him an immense amount of pain,” Le Pen said in 2025).In the 2010s, Louis Aliot theorized that shedding the Front National’s antisemitic image was one of the last barriers it had to surmount to become electable. Aliot visited Israel — a first for a politician from his party — and actively cultivated links with Israel’s political class.Aliot, who once lived with Marine Le Pen and still has an excellent relationship with her family, is today vice president of the Rassemblement National as well as mayor of Perpignan. He continues to play an influential role in the party, which has wholeheartedly adopted the strategy of pushing Zionism as a defense against historical charges of antisemitism.Marine Le Pen has called the party the “shield” of Jews in France against radical Islam, painting France’s Arab and Muslim population as a threat to Jews, an echo of familiar neoconservative narratives of a “clash of civilizations.”As president of the party, Bardella has kept the ship steady and continued to present the Rassemblement National as French Jews’ best ally, mostly through ostentatious pro-Zionist posturing. In 2025, Bardella visited Jerusalem as an official representative for the party at an Israeli government-sponsored conference on fighting antisemitism.That’s the angle that the party, which fallen into formation to claim Mediapart’s story is a hoax, is taking to defend Bardella.“I saw him at Yad Vashem, at the Nova site, in the kibbutz of Netiv HaAsara slain on October 7 . . . then in Jerusalem to bring the voice of our party into the fight against antisemitism,” a parliamentary assistant for the Rassemblement National in the EU Parliament posted. “The controversies will pass. What I saw and heard there nobody can take away.”“Mediapart is a far-left newspaper,” the party’s vice president, Aliot, told me on Tuesday, after I asked if the Rassemblement National believed the accusations against Bardella were true. “No comment.”Mediapart responded by saying that if its credibility continued to be questioned, it would be releasing the documents that it based its reporting on. Erik Tegnér, the founder of a far-right media organization called Frontières, posted that Bardella was essentially the target of right-wing elected officials who regularly leaked to Mediapart, amid speculation that the story could have been planted by Le Pen and her allies to push Bardella out of the party after tensions following her decision to run for president.Meanwhile, it’s egg on the face for France’s liberals and centrists who’ve made a big show about the party’s evolution into becoming a responsible party of government.Serge Klarsfeld, a French historian and lawyer who spent his career chasing Nazi war criminals and documenting France’s role in deporting Jews during the Holocaust, drew condemnation from many when he met with Marine Le Pen in 2024, then said he would vote “without hesitation” for the Rassemblement National over the left-wing France Insoumise.“The RN supports Jews, supports the state of Israel. It’s normal that between an antisemitic party and a pro-Jewish party, I’d vote for the pro-Jewish party,” Klarsfeld said.False critiques of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and France Insoumise have multiplied since October 2023 because of the party’s support for Palestine and condemnation of Israel’s genocide.A frequent accusation against France Insoumise these days is that it, and not the Rassemblement National, is today the party of antisemitism in France. This attitude is said to be fueled by a desire for votes from young Arab, African, and Muslim voters in the poor suburbs who are susceptible to a Soralite blend of anti-Zionism. That’s despite France Insoumise’s clear rejection of antisemitism and the doubtful prospect that this caricatured electorate actually exists.Meanwhile, the Rassemblement National coasts on a reputation promoted endlessly by figures in the media and the government that it has changed and is no longer a racist or antisemitic force.“The Rassemblement National belongs to the republican arc,” Bruno Retailleau — who was Emmanuel Macron’s interior minister across multiple governments, and is president of the mainstream conservative party Les Républicains — said last summer, using a phrase that means a party is within the realm of legitimate political expression in France.Retailleau, a particularly noxious anti-immigrant French nationalist, may offer better proof that France’s conservatives have radicalized than that anything fundamental has changed about the Rassemblement National.“Politics is communication,” Bardella reportedly wrote in the messages over a decade ago. “Ever since [Marine Le Pen’s] speech got cleaned up the number of voters has exploded,” he explained, while celebrating that the party “has stayed true to its founding ideology” for “more than 40 years.” He might insist otherwise today, but I think he was on to something.