Le Pen clan tightens grip on RN as Bardella loses footing

Full text

PARIS — In Marine Le Pen’s political world, family has a habit of finding its way back to the center of power.

That could now matter more than ever for Jordan Bardella.

The 31-year-old president of the far-right National Rally is battling allegations that he exchanged antisemitic messages as a young activist — accusations he has dismissed as “blatant falsehoods.” The controversy comes at an awkward moment for a party Le Pen has spent years trying to distance from the antisemitism associated with its past.

Le Pen has so far backed Bardella, offering her protégé an emphatic public defense. “The system will do anything — including the most disgusting things — to try to hinder this momentum,” she said, sitting next to him as they addressed reporters in the National Assembly Tuesday.

But Bardella’s difficulties inside the party predate the allegations — and the latest controversy now threatens to amplify them. His standing inside the National Rally had already grown precarious, with Le Pen drawing relatives and longtime loyalists closer as she prepares for next year’s presidential election.

Le Pen’s 27-year-old niece Nolwenn Olivier, Bardella’s former girlfriend, has been promoted to communications director. Another niece, Marion Maréchal, who broke with the party during the last presidential election, is back in favor and expected to play a frontline role. And Le Pen’s own brother-in-law, Philippe Olivier, an unofficial chief adviser, is taking part in many top campaign meetings.

At the same time, several figures associated with Bardella have been sidelined, passed over for promotion, or even ejected from the party . Once touted as a possible replacement for Le Pen, Bardella was not invited to speak at a recent National Rally parliamentary gathering, despite being party president and Le Pen’s presumptive choice for prime minister .

There is no indication Le Pen is preparing to cast Bardella aside. And yet, she has shown before that protecting the party can trump even the closest personal ties. In 2015, amid another controversy over antisemitic remarks, she backed the expulsion of the party’s founder — her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

That history leaves Bardella with little room for error as Marine Le Pen prepares for her fourth attempt at the presidency — and increasingly surrounds herself with people whose loyalty she has little reason to question.

Florian Philippot, once Le Pen’s right-hand man before abruptly leaving the party after the 2017 election, said some elements of Bardella’s treatment felt familiar.

“The little snubs, not being given a chance to speak,” Philippot said. “They are very telling.” Le Pen and her inner circle “would bring others back in and put them in the spotlight to show that you’re no longer the closest one,” he added.

Family affair

That Le Pen’s family would play a prominent role in her campaign was evident from the moment a court cleared the way for her on July 7 to run for office.

The next day she headed to La Flèche for her first campaign stop.

The town southwest of Paris is not just a National Rally stronghold. It is also a family one. Le Pen was welcomed by cheering crowds alongside her sister Marie-Caroline, who was running in the local senatorial race, and her brother-in-law Philippe Olivier.

They were accompanied, according to local press reports, by their daughter Nolwenn Olivier — Le Pen’s niece and future communications director for the campaign. Bardella, meanwhile, trailed Le Pen stony-faced as she worked the crowd and answered journalists’ questions.

Since then, Le Pen’s relatives and longtime loyalists have tightened their hold on her electoral operation.

Maréchal, who left the party but is now back in the fold, is expected to play a key role in the campaign, according to two National Rally officials. In an interview earlier this month, the 36-year-old said she could work on improving relations with the German and Italian governments if Le Pen were to win the presidency.

Beyond the family, longtime Le Pen loyalists have also been elevated. Her former chief of staff Renaud Labaye has been appointed deputy campaign director, while National Rally lawmaker Sébastien Chenu, another longstanding ally, is now in charge of local representatives.

Marine Le Pen and Marion attend a tribute on Oct. 15, 2026. | Pool photo by Eric Gaillard via AFP/Getty Images

“For Marine Le Pen, it’s either a victory in 2027 or never,” said Jean-Yves Camus, a far-right specialist with the Jean-Jaurès Foundation. “And if it’s now or never, she needs to bolster her inner circle and have absolute trust in them.”

Those close to Le Pen described the tightening of the circle less as a liability than as a source of political strength.

“Some families just have politics in their blood,” said a person close to a member of the Le Pen family, who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to discuss internal party matters. “Since when are members of the Le Pen family a handicap for the party?”

This summer, Philippe Olivier spent several weeks on holiday with Le Pen in the family bastion of La Trinité-sur-Mer in Brittany, giving him unusual access ahead of Le Pen’s campaign launch this autumn.

“He’s Marine Le Pen’s standard-bearer,” said a former National Rally adviser. “He spends his holidays with Le Pen, he has a degree of intimacy with her that is rare in politics. He’s loyal, writes her speeches.”

Olivier bristled at questions about the family’s role in the party, describing them as “insulting” in an interview with POLITICO.

“Reducing my presence in the party to my position as Marie-Caroline’s husband, when I’ve been a member of the political leadership for years — the reproaches are stupid,” he said.

Killer instinct

For veterans of the movement, it’s a familiar pattern.

The National Rally and its predecessor were run by the Le Pen family for nearly five decades before Marine Le Pen handed the reins to Bardella in 2021. Long before that, senior party figures had risen through the ranks only to find themselves eclipsed or shown the door when their ambitions collided with those of the family.

In the late 1990s, the party’s number two, Bruno Mégret, rebelled after being passed over as the lead candidate for the European Parliament election in favor of the wife of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, who was then the party leader.

The feud split the movement — and the Le Pen family itself. As Marine’s sister, Marie-Caroline, sided with the rebels, Jean-Marie began pushing Marine to the forefront of the party.

“Marine is a killer, which is a strength in politics,” said Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a senior party figure at the time who joined the breakaway faction. She had “superior political skills that her father had likely detected.”

The two sisters later reconciled. Jean-Marie Le Pen would eventually discover firsthand how ruthless his daughter could be when asserting control. In 2015, after repeated clashes over his antisemitic remarks — including a description of Nazi gas chambers as a “detail” of history — the party she led expelled him.

The pattern resurfaced after the 2017 presidential election, when Philippot, then Marine Le Pen’s right-hand man and one of the architects of the party’s surge among working-class voters, abruptly left the party after losing an internal battle over its direction.

With Le Pen, said a former senior National Rally official, “you’re either in favor or out of favor. There’s no middle ground.”

Plan B

For Bardella, the problem is not simply that Le Pen’s family has moved closer. It is that his own role has narrowed sharply since July.

For months, he had been preparing for the possibility of having to replace Le Pen as the party’s presidential candidate. Once that prospect disappeared, Bardella was expected to fall back into line behind the woman whose political future he had been preparing to inherit.

According to a top National Rally official, Bardella himself acknowledged the difficulty of that position: He had to prepare seriously enough to become a credible “Plan B” candidate while showing enough deference to make clear that Le Pen remained the party’s undisputed standard-bearer.

Jordan Bardella arrives for an election night event in La Seyne-sur-Mer, France, on 27 Sept.r 2026. | Thibaud Moritz/AFP via Getty Images

“His crime was that he really wanted to be [the presidential candidate] and he was disappointed,” said the former senior National Rally official. “He wasn’t able to hide it and morph overnight into the loyal foot soldier.”

Bardella’s reduced room for maneuver is also visible in the party’s policy direction.

His allies had pushed the National Rally toward greater fiscal caution, including a softer position on pensions. Le Pen has instead doubled down on promises to protect retirement benefits and cut taxes on fuel and electricity, while putting immigration and purchasing power back at the center of the campaign.

The focus now is to “mobilize our voters,” Philippe Olivier said. “They risk thinking that if we are not talking about immigration anymore, we’re dropping it.”

The latest controversy further complicates Bardella’s position.

In comments allegedly made when he was 17, shortly after he had joined the National Rally, Bardella said that “the Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them, and rob them” and “all banks are held by the Jews,” according to the French investigative outlet Mediapart.

On Tuesday, the National Rally launched a counterattack, forcefully denying the allegations against Bardella. At a joint press conference with Le Pen, Bardella denounced “an attempt to destabilize their campaign.” Le Pen pledged her “absolute confidence” in the party president.

Bardella has also announced that he has filed a defamation lawsuit against Mediapart.

During the period when Bardella was expected to be his party’s presidential candidate, one of his main assets was his distance from the party’s toxic past. Le Pen’s political rivals have leaped to exploit the latest developments.

“The far right will remain the far right,” said Raphaël Glucksmann , a center-left presidential hopeful. “No communications agency, no window dressing will change that.” Marine Tondelier, leader of the Green party, called on Bardella to step down “from all his responsibilities.”

“I think this ruins [Le Pen’s] strategy to shed her controversial image,” said Gaspard Gantzer, a former adviser for ex-president François Hollande.

“It’s going to make people very uncomfortable,” he said.

Sarah Paillou contributed reporting.