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Jordan Bardella (; born 13 September 1995) is a French politician who has been the president of the National Rally (RN) since 2022, after serving as acting president from September 2021 to November 2022 and as vice-president from 2019 to 2022. Bardella has also served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since 2019, when he was the lead candidate for the RN in the European Parliament election, and has been a regional councillor of Île-de-France since 2015.
Before becoming acting president of the RN, Bardella served as vice-president from 2019 to 2021 and the party's spokesman from 2017 to 2019. From 2018 to 2021, he was also president of its youth wing, the Génération Nation (GN), later renamed Rassemblement National de la Jeunesse (RNJ).
In June–July 2024, Bardella led the RN-dominated coalition into the 2024 French legislative election which resulted in historic gains for the right politics though significantly below expectations. Shortly after the election, Bardella was elected as chairman of the new Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament.
Bardella's surname is found primarily in Northern Italy (Piedmont, Veneto). His grandfather arrived in Montreuil in 1960 and in 1963 married Réjane Mada, born in 1944 in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. He works as a carpenter-cabinet maker. Réjane Mada is the daughter of an Algerian from Kabylia, Mohand Séghir Mada (1903-1974), born in Guendouz, in the commune of Ait R'Zine, who came to France in the 1930s to work as a construction laborer in Villeurbanne, and his wife, Denise Annette Jaeck, a Parisian of Alsatian origin. Guerrino Bardella and Réjane Mada divorced when Bardella was one year old, and Guerrino settled in Casablanca, Morocco, where he married a Moroccan woman named Hakima.
Bardella grew up in a local council tower block in Drancy, "in the eighth floor of a drab high-rise tower." Bardella claims that, "like many families who live in the neighbourhood", he was "confronted with violence at an early age" and saw how his "mum had difficulty making ends meet". His father was a business owner, living in the wealthier suburb of Montmorency, and Bardella spent weekends and Wednesdays there. Critics mention that his father had some wealth when Bardella focuses on the social difficulties he had to face growing up in France's poorest department, a social hotspot with the highest proportion of Immigration.
Bardella received a high school diploma with distinction in economics and social sciences at the semi-private Catholic lycée Jean-Baptiste-de-La-Salle. He failed the entrance exam for Sciences Po, Bardella studied geography at Paris-Sorbonne University but dropped out to focus on politics.
Bardella ran in the 2015 departmental elections to represent the commune of Tremblay-en-France. He and his fellow candidate, Christine Prus, lost in the second round with 41% of the vote. In the 2015 regional elections, he was a candidate at the head of the FN list in Seine-Saint-Denis and was elected to the Regional Council of Île-de-France.
In January 2016, Bardella launched the organization Banlieues Patriotes. The group sought to "break with the politics of the city and reach out to voters in the forgotten territories of the Republic." He then became part of Marine Le Pen's campaign team in the 2017 presidential election, in which she finished second. Bardella was a candidate for Seine-Saint-Denis's 12th constituency in the legislative elections that year, and was eliminated in the first round with 15% of the vote.
At age 23, Bardella was designated as the first candidate on the National Rally list (as the FN was renamed in 2018) for the 2019 European Parliament election in France. He was called a "puppet of Marine Le Pen" by Libération and seen as inexperienced by many voters. Nevertheless, the RN finished the election in first place with 23 seats and 23.3% of the popular vote, ahead of President Emmanuel Macron's La République En Marche! Bardella thus became the second-youngest MEP in European Union history after Ilka Schröder of Germany, who was elected at 21. Along with the rest of the FN delegation, he sits with the Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the European Parliament. He is also a member of the European Parliament Committee on Petitions.
Bardella was named second vice-president of the RN on 16 June 2019, and first vice-president in 2021. He headed the RN list in the 2021 French regional elections in Île-de-France, receiving 13.8% of the vote in the first round and 10.8% in the second. By contrast, the right-wing list led by Valérie Pécresse won with 46% of the vote. Journalist Richard Werly attributed the defeat to Bardella's "inability to find a convincing regional angle despite his familial connections to" and "lack of depth in a university-educated region, having abandoned his post-secondary studies."
He takes the lead of the third group in the European Parliament, Patriots for Europe, initiated by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban. The latter gives the far-right group the objectives of positioning itself against "military support for Ukraine" and against "illegal immigration" and for the "traditional family" and "easing environmental constraints". One of the six vice-presidents of this group is the Italian politician Roberto Vannacci. Bardella also joined the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee (AFET), which is described by Euractiv as "an opportunity to gain depth on international issues."
Bardella helped bring the National Rally to victory during the 2024 European Parliament election as the party achieved a score of 31.37%, gaining 30 seats, coming in first place in front of the presidential party-list led by Valérie Hayer (14.60%, 13 seats).
In February 2025, Bardella cancelled a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after Steve Bannon was accused of making an Nazi salute.
On 31 March, Marine Le Pen was found guilty of embezzling EU funds and sentenced to a four-year prison sentence, of which two years would be suspended, whilst also being barred from running in the 2027 French Presidential Election. As Bardella was not involved in the scandal, he quickly became the front-runner to be the RN candidate.
In February 2023, Bardella applauded a speech by Volodymyr Zelensky in the European Parliament. Regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bardella expressed the belief that Putin is waging a wider war on the West and that that "there is a war of interest and a war of influence between France and Russia that extends to Africa." He also declared that there can be no way out of the war "without the withdrawal of Russian troops and without the return to full sovereignty of Ukraine in the territories currently occupied by Russia" . However, a spokesperson for Bardella later clarified to Libération that this statement does not concern Crimea and the other territories controlled by pro-Russian secessionists since the Donbass war. In 2023, La Tribune analyzed that Bardella's stance on Russia is more critical compared to that of Marine Le Pen and that "Jordan Bardella is on the pro-American line of Giorgia Meloni."
In March 2025, Bardella attended a conference in Israel aimed at combatting antisemitism. This event was notable for its attendance of right-wing allies, which also led to some high-profile people set to attend from 'boycotting' the event in protest, including the UK's Chief Rabbi. Bardella supports Israel in the Gaza war and believes that the Hamas threat facing Israel is equivalent to the threat posed by radical Islamists and terrorists to France.
Guerrino Bardella, Jordan Bardella's paternal grandfather, settled in Morocco (in Casablanca), where he has a 10-year residence permit, and married a Moroccan woman.
Bardella is an Agnosticism.
He denied rumors that he is gay in an interview on M6 June 2025, declaring "I am heterosexual". Responding to TikTok videos that claims he is, he attributed those to social media user's "unlimited imagination". When pressed further on the persistent rumors and if there was any truth, he answered, "I could say the opposite to please you, but … there’s not the shadow of a doubt.”
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