Forced to wait his turn, Marine Le Pen's deputy Bardella returns to the shadows

Had he been allowed to run, with his party's sizeable lead in the polls and his own strong approval ratings, by spring 2027 he could have succeeded Emmanuel Macron as France's youngest president – and the first hard-right head of state in modern French history.Born in 1995, Bardella was brought up by his Italian-born single mother, Luisa, on the outskirts of Paris.Although he has often said she struggled to make ends meet, his father Olivier, also of Italian origin, ran a drinks distribution business and lived in the more affluent town of Montmorency. That detail undercuts the hard-luck narrative surrounding Bardella's early years which he would later use to appeal to a wider electorate.Neither parent was particularly political and, according to an interview a friend from his teenage years gave to Le Monde, nor was the young Bardella, preferring to spend time on his PlayStation and streaming his Call of Duty sessions on a YouTube channel called Jordan9320.Yet when he decided to join the far-right National Front as a 17-year-old in 2012, he climbed the ranks quickly. He was made local departmental secretary at 19 and regional councillor for the Paris region at 20. Along the way, he dropped out of university to focus on his political career.Getty ImagesJordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen during their last appearance before the verdict in Le Pen's appeal trialBardella would later attribute his initial decision to join the party to a fascination with Marine Le Pen, who had taken the reins of the party from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2011 and was working to turn it from a fringe, extremist movement into a respectable political force."There's something about her that others don't have," Bardella said in 2021. "She has a character, an energy... a courage that speak to me."