France. Jordan Bardella becomes the new president of the National Federation. He will replace Marine Le Pen

Bardella won the National Unity (RN) caucus with 85 percent of the party members’ vote. Louis Elliott, former partner, won 15 percent of the remaining votes Marine Le Pen. According to reports from the French daily Le Figaro, Le Pen will retain far-reaching control of the party.

– I won’t go on vacation. I will go where the country needs me, she said during the conference.

Le Pen announced in June that she would stop chairing the National Union because she wanted to focus on running the group’s parliamentary constituency in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament. France. Before losing the presidential election in April, she temporarily handed over the leadership of the Bardelli Party. Reuters has indicated that it expects Le Pen to run for president again in 2027.

As the Associated Press notes, Bardella will be the first RN chief not affiliated with the Le Pen clan. The first leader and co-founder of this formation, formerly the National Front (FN), was Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The front was created by the leaders of the Ordre Nouveau (New Order) party, which at the turn of the 60s and 70s was the most important formation of neo-fascism in France. In its manifesto, the party defined itself as an “anti-capitalist, liberal and anti-Marxist movement”.

Jordan Bardella is considered a person very close to Marine Le Pen and is sometimes called a “cyborg” – he writes “Le Figaro”. He is, like her, an anti-immigrant politician, although he himself is of Italian-Algerian descent. In economic affairs, he declares himself a protectionist. It is not clear whether he shares his mentor’s pro-Russian stance.

When he was 19, he was elected secretary of the party branch of Seine-Saint-Denis in Ile-de-France, making him the youngest provincial official on the supervisory board. At 23, Bardella became a member of the European Parliament. As Le Figaro wrote, the new chairman of the supervisory board is particularly popular in the “hardline wing” of his party.