Jordan Bardella could become prime minister of France at age 28. But who is he?

The French want to know who the real Jordan Bardera is.

This was an intriguing question back when Bardella was merely the leader of the country’s largest party, the far-right National Rally (RN).

It has become a matter of urgency now that he is being openly spoken of as the country’s next prime minister.

General elections called by President Emmanuel Macron following his defeat to the RN in last Sunday’s European Parliament elections will take place in two weeks.

If the RN wins another landslide victory in the second round on July 7, Mr Macron will have no choice but to give it a chance to govern, which would see Mr Bardella, who shares the party leadership with Marine Le Pen, named prime minister.

Everyone in France knows the basics about Mr Bardella and his meteoric rise from an unemployed school leaver in the northern suburbs of Paris to protégé of Ms Le Pen and then leader of the party.

Everyone knows the president is incredibly young, only 28, but this doesn’t seem to matter much these days when experience is less important: the current president is 46 and the prime minister is 35.

They know him to be well-behaved, well-spoken, and a very presentable person.

But what he thinks, where he stands ideologically, what kind of person he is – these are all unknowns. The French have a distinct sense that the man they see is like a package: nicely wrapped, but the contents are a mystery.

The official version of Bardella, as presented on the label, is of a young man who grew up in a poor area of ​​Seine-Saint-Denis and, after living amid a scourge of drugs, poverty, lawlessness and out-of-control immigration, came to believe that only the far right held the answers.

This is a French term borrowed from the marketing world: “le story-telling.”

As he himself said, “I went into politics because of all the experiences I had there, to prevent it from becoming the norm for the whole of France, because what is happening there is not normal.”

The truth is more nuanced. Mr. Bardella was certainly raised by his single mother, Luisa, in the Gabriel-Péri neighborhood of Saint-Denis, so his experience is real enough. Both his parents were of Italian descent, and his paternal grandmother was Algerian.

But Mr. Bardella’s father, Olivier, a beverage distributor who left home when Jordan was young, was relatively well off: He lived in the commuter town of Montmorency, and Mr. Bardella attended a semi-private Catholic school popular with the middle class rather than the nearest public school.

“The young Bardella had a foot on both sides,” said Pierre-Stephane Fort, author of a critical biography of the RN president.

For a recent profile in Le Monde, we returned to Saint-Denis to track down friends and acquaintances of the younger Bardella.

His friends noticed he’d left few traces behind. They remembered that he was a video game fan and that he had started a YouTube channel to discuss the latest releases. They also recalled that, at age 16, he taught literacy to immigrants after school at his school. But they didn’t recall him having any particular interest in far-right politics.

“In my opinion, he looked across the political world and saw where he had the best chance of climbing the ladder,” Chantal Chatelain, a teacher at his school, told Le Monde.

Mr Bardella joined the party at age 17 and rose quickly to prominence as he became part of Ms Le Pen’s inner circle.

Many of the RN’s top brass are driven by personal relationships and family loyalties, just as they were when Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, was at the helm of the party then known as the National Front (FN). Mr. Bardella became the boyfriend of the daughter of Frédéric Châtillon, a veteran FN member.

Days after being introduced to Le Pen in 2017, she appointed him her party’s spokesman. In 2019, she asked him to top the party’s candidate list in the European Parliament elections, which the RN won. He became a member of the European Parliament. And in 2022, she appointed him as her party leader.

Pascal Humeau, a media trainer who worked with Mr. Bardella for four years, said Ms. Le Pen immediately saw that the young man, whose story of suburban hardship was so perfect, could be an asset to the party. She called him a “lion cub.”

But Humeau is not exactly complimentary of Bardella himself — the two men parted ways after a dispute over money, so his testimony must be treated with caution — but today he describes the RN leader as a pure PR stunt.

“He was a man of few contents. There wasn’t much to him in terms of content,” Humeau said. “He didn’t read much, he wasn’t curious. He just absorbed the elements of language that Marine gave him.”

Humeau said he spent months trying to get Bardella to shed his stiff demeanor and show a more natural smile: “I had to humanize the cyborg. My job was to get people who would otherwise dislike him to say, ‘Hey! He’s a fascist, but he’s a nice guy!'”

Biographer Pierre-Stephane Fort has also been a critic of Bardella, saying there is little substance behind the personable image.

“He’s a chameleon. He adapts perfectly to the environment around him,” he said. “And he’s a total opportunist. There’s no ideology there. He’s a pure strategist. He senses which way the wind is blowing and he steps in early.”

Indeed, it is impossible to slot Mr Bardella into any of the RN’s various factions or political groupings – he has been with the “social” faction, which focuses on the poor and social housing, and the “identity” faction, which focuses on race relations and preserving French culture – but he mainly goes where Ms Le Pen goes.

Like her and the rest of his party, he has made tough-on-crime and tough-on-immigration platforms a norm, saying France is “being devoured by immigrants” — but he has been deliberately vague on specifics.

His popularity is undeniable as he speaks alongside Bardella — young women think he’s “gorgeous” and he smiles for everyone and takes selfies with them — but watch for a while and you’ll see the all-too-natural reappearance of the smile.

And if you listen for a while, you’ll hear the same metaphors and stereotypes repeated again and again.

In a recent televised debate with Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, Bardella made his case, but it was clear who was the cleverer. Fortunately for Bardella, Attal ruined his advantage with a constant smirk — the kind of condescending attitude RN loves to use.

For Le Pen, the lion cub has been a huge asset, enabling him to broaden the party’s appeal far beyond traditional social categories. Bardella is a frequent TikTok user, and has clearly connected with young people: He regularly posts short videos of himself (packaged by media companies) to his 1.3 million followers.

He also enjoys popularity among graduates, pensioners and city dwellers – groups that have resisted RNs in the past.

But the question remains unanswered: is his charm simply a result of his excellent communication skills, or is he the right person to run a country?

He is 28 years old, has never attended college, has no government experience and, apart from a month in the summer working for his father’s company, has never worked outside the navy – something that, until recently, made him an unlikely candidate for prime minister of France.

But do the old rules still apply?

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