PARIS — French far-right leader Jordan Bardella is taking on more international responsibilities for his party, the National Rally, as part of a push to reassure international markets worried about the cost of Marine Le Pen’s populist platform. An aide to Bardella told reporters that the National Rally president’s Friday speech at the Reform UK party congress in Birmingham and visit to the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy on Saturday are the beginning of a concerted campaign to strategically deploy the 30-year-old. Bardella is also slated to give 10 interviews to international media outlets in the coming days.
He led the party to impressive victories in the 2019 and 2024 European elections and is now the head of the Patriots group in the European Parliament. The party is now more popular than ever, and Le Pen is the front-runner to win next year’s presidential election. But when it looked like an embezzlement conviction would doom Le Pen’s chances at running for the presidency, Bardella, as the National Rally’s presumptive candidate, tried to woo more fiscally conservative voters — including France’s business elite — by flirting with a more market-friendly platform than his mentor.
But Bardella has been adjusting to a secondary role since an appeals court cleared a path for Le Pen to run as the party’s presidential nominee — and she has made clear that fiscal discipline won’t come at the expense of the promises she has made to her core voters. That includes her pledge to lower the retirement age for most workers to 62 at a cost of €9 billion per year. Bardella is now eyeing a role similar to the one Giorgia Meloni held before she became Italian prime minister in 2022.
Bardella “watched with great interest the campaign of Giorgia Meloni, who flooded the international press to reassure institutions and the financial markets,” the aide said. The carving up of roles between Bardella and Le Pen also makes sense given Le Pen’s spotty track record of international trips — notably her reported failed attempt to meet U.S. President Donald Trump — and the difficulties in shedding the toxic baggage linked to her name.
Her father, party founder Jean-Marie, was notorious for downplaying the Holocaust and was convicted of hate speech multiple times.
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