National Rally’s Jordan Bardella rails at ‘war’ on party after antisemitism claims

Jordan Bardella, the head of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN), has claimed a “total war” is being waged against his party as he faces a political storm after the publication of antisemitic comments he allegedly wrote as a young party member.Bardella, who is facing calls from political opponents to resign, said on Tuesday that the report by the investigative website Mediapart was false. To a standing ovation from his party’s lawmakers and senators at a meeting in parliament, he said the report was an attempt to damage his party as Le Pen tops the polls before the 2027 presidential election.“We are seeing the beginnings of a total war, an attempt to destabilise the presidential campaign,” Bardella said. He accused Mediapart of wanting “to kill my political career” and said he would take legal action for defamation. Le Pen, at Bardella’s side, said she had “absolute confidence” in him.Journalists at Mediapart said they had independently authenticated the comments allegedly written between 2013 and 2015, including in email groups and on messaging services. Bardella was aged 17 to 18 at the time and was a member of the party that was then called the Front National.The alleged comments included “the Jew has to dominate other peoples, crush them, and rob them; a Zionist is necessarily a Jew, and fundamentally so”. He is also alleged to have written “all the banks are owned by Jews”.Mediapart’s investigation has shaken Le Pen’s presidential campaign. Since Le Pen took over the party leadership in 2011, she has sought to detoxify the party image and move it away from its antisemitic past in order to increase its electoral reach.When Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founded the party in 1972, its ranks included former members of a Waffen SS military unit under Nazi command during the second world war.Pierre Bousquet, a former member of the Waffen SS Charlemagne division, was the party’s treasurer for its first nine years. Another early member had been in the paramilitary militia under Philippe Pétain, the leader of the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Nazis and ensured the deportation of one-quarter of France’s Jewish population to concentration camps, about 76,000 people.In 1987, Jean-Marie Le Pen described the Holocaust as a “mere detail” of the second world war. In the decades that followed he was convicted more than 15 times for hate speech and contesting crimes against humanity as he repeated negationist comments, including saying the Nazi occupation was “not particularly inhumane”.Marine Le Pen, who expelled her father from the party in 2015 after he repeated antisemitic comments, has in recent years directly appealed to French Jewish voters. She said her party would protect them, describing the RN as “the best shield for our fellow French citizens of Jewish faith”.Bardella and Marine Le Pen at a rally in Lievin, northern France, in July. Photograph: Jean-François Badias/APBardella made an unprecedented visit to Israel in 2025, the first by a French far-right leader, in an attempt to demonstrate the RN’s new credentials. In 2023, Bardella told a TV interviewer he did not think Jean-Marie Le Pen was antisemitic, before backtracking on his comments after criticism.The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, responding to the Mediapart investigation, wrote on social media: “To all those with a short memory: antisemitism isn’t an accident in the RN, it’s that party’s history. That’s the real face of the far right.”Aurore Bergé, the minister for equality and against discrimination, said the “antisemitic and conspiracy theory” content of the alleged messages “reminds those who might have forgotten the nature of the far right”.Raphaël Glucksmann, a candidate in the Socialist presidential primary, wrote on social media that no public relations exercise would fundamentally change the RN. “Let us never forget that they all joined a party founded by antisemitic fanatics and out-and-out racists,” he said.Yonathan Arfi, of the CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organisations, told France Culture radio he was “stupefied by the virulence of the antisemitic comments” allegedly made by Bardella. He said that if true, the comments undermined the RN’s claims to have detoxified its image.He asked: “How could a political party leader, having made such sickening comments, reach such a high position in a party that claims to have changed and now fights against the hatred of Jews?”The Green leader, Marine Tondelier, said Bardella, an MEP, should resign from all his political positions. She said: “The man who presents himself today as the biggest defender of Jews … is in reality an obsessional antisemite.”