France. Jordan Bardella becomes the new head of the National Union. Will replace Marine Le Pen

Bardella at the party congress of the National Unity (RN) won 85 percent of the votes of the party members. Louis Aliot, a former partner, won 15 percent of the remaining votes Marine Le Pen. According to reports from the French daily Le Figaro, Le Pen will retain far-reaching control of the party.

– I’m not going on vacation. I will go where the country needs me – she said during the congress.

Le Pen announced in June that she would stop being the head of the National Union because she wanted to focus on managing the group’s parliamentary circle in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament. France. Before losing April’s presidential elections, she temporarily handed over the leadership of the Bardelli party. Reuters noted it expects Le Pen to stand in the presidential race again in 2027.

As the Associated Press notes, Bardella will be the first RN boss not to belong to the Le Pen clan. The first leader and co-founder of this formation, formerly known as the National Front (FN), was Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The front was created by the leaders of the Ordre Nouveau (New Order) party, which at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s was the most important neo-fascist formation in France. The party defined itself in its manifesto as an “anti-capitalist, anti-liberal and anti-Marxist movement”.

Jordan Bardella is considered a person very close to Marine Le Pen and is sometimes called her “cyborg” – writes “Le Figaro”. He is, like her, an anti-immigration politician, although he himself is of Italian-Algerian origin. In economic matters, he declares himself an advocate of protectionism. It is not clear if he shares the pro-Russian attitude of his mentor.

When he was 19, he was elected secretary of the party’s Seine-Saint-Denis branch in Ile-de-France, making him the youngest regional official of the Supervisory Board. At 23, Bardella became an MEP. As Le Figaro writes, the new head of the Supervisory Board is particularly popular in the “militant wing” of his party.