France got a bombshell answer on Tuesday to the biggest question looming over its politics. Marine Le Pen will be the far right’s main candidate for president next year, not Jordan Bardella, her smooth, well-tailored, TikTok-ready protégé, after a court verdict that lifted a ban on Ms. Le Pen seeking office.
But that opens the door to another question, which may prove harder to answer: How well will this cross-generational pair perform together, especially after Mr. Bardella spent months preparing to take her place?
“We’re offering the French people a duo, a president of the republic and a prime minister,” Ms. Le Pen said on Tuesday, in confirming her candidacy. “I think that duo is a winning one. It’s a winning ticket, so to speak.”
After three bids for the presidency, Ms. Le Pen, 57, is one of France’s most familiar political figures. She grew up in the political spotlight, a daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded her party in 1972 as the National Front on a combination of racism, nativism and antisemitism. Mr. Bardella, 30, rose from a teenage activist to president of the party, now renamed the National Rally, in barely a decade.
In many ways, the two complement each other. Mr. Bardella is viewed as more pro-business and less hostile to the European Union than Ms. Le Pen, a classic populist who once called for France to follow Britain out of the E.U. With his smooth style and youthful appeal, he softens the hard edges of his older mentor.
And yet, the partnership could show cracks. Despite his meteoric rise, Mr. Bardella remains an elusive figure — sure-footed and self-confident, yet untested and opaque. How he will adjust to his new reality is unclear. After 15 months of playing the role of dauphin to Ms. Le Pen, when her presidential dreams seemed all but extinguished, he is back to being her wingman.
For all of those reasons, analysts and members of the National Rally say, Ms. Le Pen may prove a better bet than Mr. Bardella to run as the far right’s candidate to succeed President Emmanuel Macron, who is term-limited and will step down next May.
Steeled by decades of experience and armed with a narrative of having faced down a hostile legal system, she enters the campaign with considerable momentum.
“She’s got far more political assets than Bardella,” said Philippe Marlière, a professor of European and French politics at University College London. “Although she is a member of the Le Pen dynasty, she’s done enough across time to distance herself from her father’s legacy. She’s been around for so long.”
Ms. Le Pen’s legal troubles remain a risk. Though her election ban was lifted, her conviction for embezzlement was upheld, a decision that she is appealing. Still, several experts predict she will be a stronger, even safer, candidate than Mr. Bardella.
“I see two paths,” said Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a National Rally lawmaker who is close to Ms. Le Pen, a few days before Tuesday’s verdict. “Marine’s path is a meadow; Jordan’s path goes through the woods.”
A product of the working-class Paris suburbs, from a family with Italian immigrant roots, Mr. Bardella casts himself as politician who can speak to people’s everyday anxieties. But he has recently shown a taste for the beau monde. Last month, he stepped out in Monaco with a glamorous girlfriend, Maria Carolina de Bourbon des Deux-Siciles, an Italian-born princess and social media influencer.
Critics say the relationship undercuts his populist credentials, which were already in question because of his efforts to win over parts of the French establishment.
Mr. Bardella has courted French business leaders, the bastions of an elite that the far right has long vowed to topple. He has also called for a union of right-wing parties, from the center right to the far right. That would have been anathema to Ms. Le Pen’s father, whose uncompromising policies made the party a political pariah for decades.
Though Mr. Bardella echoes Ms. Le Pen’s far-right themes — curbing immigration and reasserting French sovereignty — he promises disruption without destruction. Neither an old-school populist like Ms. Le Pen nor a traditional right-wing leader like Jacques Chirac or Nicolas Sarkozy, former presidents, Mr. Bardella has tried to expand his party’s support by appealing to voters in both right-wing camps.
“That’s the mission Marine gave him,” Mr. Tanguy said. “The billion-dollar question is: Did he enjoy the mission so much that it became real?”
Raphaël LLorca, an analyst at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a left-leaning research group in Paris, recently conducted focus groups with voters who said they were predisposed to back the National Rally next year. The biggest surprise, he said, was that they expressed almost no sense of Mr. Bardella as a person.
“They don’t know his tastes, they don’t know what he likes, they don’t know exactly what his flaws are, where he draws his energy from, what obstacles he has been able to overcome,” Mr. LLorca said.
Because Mr. Bardella is a blank canvas, his new relationship took on outsize importance. He has declared he is in love with Princess Maria Carolina, 23, and introduced her in a carefully choreographed manner, calling in Paris Match, the French weekly magazine, to do a splashy feature on the couple in April.
Her family’s extreme wealth, and her jet-setting lifestyle could alienate working-class voters in the National Rally’s heartland.
For Mr. Bardella, who acknowledges that his life, since young adulthood, has been consumed by politics, the relationship nevertheless adds a dash of color to an otherwise monochrome palette. One of his previous relationships was with a niece of Ms. Le Pen.
Though the two leaders present themselves as ideologically interchangeable, there are differences between them, particularly on economic policy, where Ms. Le Pen is viewed as more suspicious of corporate interests. Mr. Bardella is more willing to work with Europe’s centrist political establishment. He recently praised Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany for his immigration policy.
And he has tried to calm fears that France would leave its eastern neighbors to the predations of Russia. While he sticks to a party pledge to pull France out of NATO’s integrated military command — something Charles de Gaulle did in 1966, before France returned in 2009 — he said that would not occur while the war in Ukraine was still raging.
Mr. Bardella is trying to distance himself from President Trump. He has rejected offers of support from the Trump administration, which backed “patriotic European parties” in its National Security Strategy and sent a State Department official to lobby on behalf of Ms. Le Pen after her embezzlement conviction.
“For us, it is quite a good thing that there is less America in Europe,” said Pierre-Romain Thionnet, an adviser to Mr. Bardella.
In interviews, party officials said the duo’s different profiles could help appeal to different parts of the electorate.
“Working-class supporters are particularly big fans of Marine, and young people really identify with Jordan,” said Philippe Olivier, a party elder who is married to Ms. Le Pen’s older sister, Marie-Caroline Le Pen. “But in the end, there’s no divergence between the two.”
Mr. Tanguy took a slightly different view. “Jordan is energetic, dynamic, but more frightening because we don’t know where we’re going,” he said. “It would be reassuring for voters to have a woman whose flaws and qualities they already know so well.”
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
