Source: The Conversation – UK
Marine Le Pen has confirmed she intends to run in next year’s presidential election in France, despite her appeal against a conviction for embezzlement of EU funds being rejected.
A Paris appeals court sentenced the leader of France’s right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) party to three years imprisonment, with two years suspended. She will have to serve one year wearing an electronic tag. But Le Pen confirmed hours after the sentence was handed down that she will still contest the election and would pursue all available legal avenues to have the sentence overturned: “The campaign begins tonight,” she told French television.
This may well prove to be a missed opportunity for RN to fight the election under the leadership of Le Pen’s deputy, the youthful and charismatic Jordan Bardella. Bardella was slated to run if Le Pen had been barred from the election. Now he will campaign as Le Pen’s putative prime minister in what the RN leader called a “winning ticket”.
But Le Pen has already unsuccessfully contested presidential elections in 2017 and 2022, framing them as a battle for the “soul of France”. It may prove hard to convince voters a third time that the soul of France is in danger.
Bardella, meanwhile, has been busily burnishing his credentials as the spearhead of a new generation of politicians, hoping to emulate the appeal of Emmanuel Macron in 2017, when he became the youngest president at the age of 39. Bardella will be 31 in September, but he is already a political veteran.
He joined Le Pen’s National Front – as RN was known – in 2012 at the age of 16 and was an office-holder within the party within two years. Over the intervening decade or so, he has carefully cultivated the image of a working-class man made good. He is adept in his use of social media, with 1.6 million followers on TikTok and 747,000 on Instagram.
But beyond his charisma and his savvy use of social media, his rise also demonstrates forces which have transformed the political landscape in France over recent years. And these are forces which could give him an edge over his political mentor were he to run in her stead.
Bardella’s authenticity
Bardella’s solid working-class credentials, which gives him the edge on authenticity when speaking about issues of concern to French voters. His background delivers political capital that Le Pen could never manage. Le Pen is from a political dynasty, inheriting the National Front from her father in a leadership election in 2011. Thanks to her privileged life in the family’s political business, she has found it difficult to deliver convincing messages about poverty and lack of opportunity.
Bardella, meanwhile, was born in Drancy, one of metropolitan France’s poorest areas and raised in Aubervilliers on a council estate in one of the most notorious departments in France – Seine-Saint-Denis. Referred to as the neuf trois (nine three) in French rap songs because of its departmental number 93, Seine-Saint-Denis is notorious throughout France as hosting some of the most socially excluded and underprivileged communities in the country.
So when Bardella talks on issues effecting the lives of working people in France his remarks have an authenticity that Le Pen could never muster. Indeed, when he discusses immigration and integration, for example when advocating policies of “national preference” of welfare payment towards French citizens and changing the French constitution to enshrine tough migration rules in constitutional laws, he says this as someone who grew up in one of France’s most diverse areas – Seine-Saint-Denis is home to over 130 nationalities.
This is in stark contrast Le Pen, who was born and raised in wealthy Neuilly-sur-Seine. Generally recognised as the most expensive suburb of Paris, it’s home to ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, the Bettencourt family heirs to the L’Oréal fortune and the fashion designer Pierre Cardin.
Gender and politics
The other big advantage Bardella has in appealing to the French right is his gender. Despite efforts to even the balance and attract more high-profile women into frontline politics, France has made little progress since the bad old days when Ségolène Royal, the first woman to contest the presidency in 2007, was ridiculed by her rival, Dominique Strauss-Kahn with the phrase: “politics is not a beauty contest.”
Bardella has taken pains to project himself as a red-blooded heterosexual Frenchman, something he went on the country’s equivalent of Oprah Winfrey in 2025 to publicly affirm, scotching rumours about his sexuality. His recent high-profile romance with Maria Carolina de Bourbon des Deux-Siciles – an Italian princess and social media influencer – while perhaps not doing much for his image as a champion of the working class, would certainly seem to demonstrate his heterosexuality for any doubters.
Le Pen, by contrast, has suffered from a conservative bias in France against women in politics, which has even been shown to manifest itself in penalising women candidates based on their smile. Despite France having some of the strictest gender equality laws in European politics – a 2007 parity law mandates that political lists in France must be at least 50% women – there has been a decline in recent years in the number of women being elected to the national assembly.
Rise of the far right in Europe
Bardella’s career in politics has also coincided with, and benefited from, a shift in European politics which has seen the far right move from the political fringes to the mainstream.
On mass immigration, consistently a big issue in French politics, Bardella takes many of his cues from the US president, Donald Trump, and his vice-president, J.D. Vance. He told the BBC in December 2025 that he shares their concerns about Europe facing “civilisational erasure” due to mass immigration.
While this sparked outrage in the English-speaking world, in France this is a political idea that has become increasingly mainstream in recent years. The “great replacement” theory: that the white, French catholic population is being replaced by an “invasion” of mass migration from Africa, has become a central feature of political discussion. It’s even the subject of a best-selling novel about an Islamist political takeover of France.
But the road to the Élysée Palace is unlikely to be smooth for either Le Pen or Bardella. Macron’s unavailability to run may mean that the centre-right is missing a reliable champion in 2027, but there are a range of figures from the centre of French politics already mobilising.
If Le Pen is their target, her conviction provides them with a great deal of ready-made ammunition. But Bardella is unlikely to fnd the route to the Élysée Palace any smoother. The chaos of the Trump presidency and the calamity of Brexit have tarnished the appeal of populism – and the risk-averse French public may struggle to pull the trigger on a right-wing president in his early 30s.
Then there’s the French electoral system. Only if a candidate receives more than 50% in the first round of voting do they win automatically. In practice this hardly ever happens.
A common saying in France is that in the first round voters vote with their heart, and in the second round with their heads. So it’s likely that even if Bardella has a place in the hearts of many French voters, their heads may still guide them to vote for a more experienced and mainstream candidate in the second round – as Le Pen found to her cost in 2017 and 2022.
Joseph Downing does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.