Many National Rally supporters will be relieved Le Pen is running instead. She has made politics her life, has already run three presidential campaigns, and her decision has boosted her lead in the polls.
Bardella’s age and lack of experience, many feared, would have come under close scrutiny and could have become a liability.
Still, Bardella’s body language at Wednesday’s campaign event in the north-west was telling.
While Le Pen beamed at the cameras, brushing off suggestions her deputy would mind being sidelined and insisting “our personal ambitions are absolutely irrelevant”, he barely reacted and scarcely smiled.
The speedy climb in National Rally ranks that has characterised his political career seems to have stalled.
Had he been allowed to run, with his party’s sizeable lead in the polls and his own strong approval ratings, by spring 2027 he could have succeeded Emmanuel Macron as France’s youngest president – and the first hard-right head of state in modern French history.
Born in 1995, Bardella was brought up by his Italian-born single mother, Luisa, on the outskirts of Paris.
Although he has often said she struggled to make ends meet, his father Olivier, also of Italian origin, ran a drinks distribution business and lived in the more affluent town of Montmorency. That detail undercuts the hard-luck narrative surrounding Bardella’s early years which he would later use to appeal to a wider electorate.
Neither parent was particularly political and, according to an interview a friend from his teenage years gave to Le Monde, nor was the young Bardella, preferring to spend time on his PlayStation and streaming his Call of Duty sessions on a YouTube channel called Jordan9320.
Yet when he decided to join the far-right National Front as a 17-year-old in 2012, he climbed the ranks quickly. He was made local departmental secretary at 19 and regional councillor for the Paris region at 20. Along the way, he dropped out of university to focus on his political career.
