Bardella denies antisemitism claims as far-right party faces 'total war' accusation

Jordan Bardella stood before his party's lawmakers and senators in parliament on Tuesday and declared himself the victim of a coordinated attack. The head of Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally was responding to an investigation published by Mediapart, the investigative news site, which had documented antisemitic comments he allegedly wrote between 2013 and 2015 when he was seventeen and eighteen years old. Bardella called it a "total war" waged against his party—an attempt to destabilize the presidential campaign as Le Pen leads the polls heading toward the 2027 election. He denied the report was accurate and said he would pursue legal action for defamation. Le Pen, standing beside him, offered her "absolute confidence" in his character. The room filled with applause from his party's representatives.

Mediapart's journalists said they had independently verified the comments, which appeared in email groups and messaging services from Bardella's early years as a party member. The alleged statements were stark. "The Jew has to dominate other peoples, crush them, and rob them; a Zionist is necessarily a Jew, and fundamentally so," he was said to have written. He also allegedly claimed that "all the banks are owned by Jews." These were not stray remarks but part of a pattern documented across multiple platforms over a two-year span.

The timing of the revelation cuts directly at the heart of Le Pen's fifteen-year project to remake her party's image. When she took control in 2011, the National Rally—then still called the Front National—carried the weight of its founding history. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had established the party in 1972 with members who included former soldiers from the Waffen SS Charlemagne division, a Nazi military unit. Pierre Bousquet, one of those former SS members, served as the party's treasurer for its first nine years. Another early member had belonged to the paramilitary militia under Philippe Pétain, whose Vichy regime collaborated with Nazi Germany and deported roughly 76,000 French Jews—about one-quarter of the country's Jewish population—to concentration camps. Jean-Marie Le Pen himself had spent decades making inflammatory statements: in 1987 he called the Holocaust a "mere detail" of the Second World War, and he was convicted more than fifteen times for hate speech and denying crimes against humanity.

Marine Le Pen expelled her father from the party in 2015 after he repeated antisemitic remarks, a move that signaled her determination to break with that past. In recent years she has directly courted French Jewish voters, telling them the National Rally would be their protector and describing the party as "the best shield for our fellow French citizens of Jewish faith." Bardella himself made an unprecedented visit to Israel in 2025, the first by a French far-right leader, intended to demonstrate the party's transformation. Yet in 2023, when asked on television whether he thought his party's founder was antisemitic, Bardella said no—a position he walked back only after public criticism.

The Mediapart investigation has shaken the campaign. France's foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, responded by posting on social media that antisemitism was not an accident in the National Rally's history but rather its defining character. Aurore Bergé, the minister for equality and against discrimination, said the alleged messages revealed "the nature of the far right" to anyone who might have forgotten. Raphaël Glucksmann, a Socialist primary candidate, wrote that no public relations effort could change what the party fundamentally was: an organization founded by "antisemitic fanatics and out-and-out racists."

Yonathan Arfi, representing CRIF, the umbrella organization of French Jewish groups, told France Culture radio that he was "stupefied by the virulence" of the comments if they were authentic. He posed a direct question: how could someone who had written such statements rise to lead a party that claimed to have shed its hateful past? Marine Tondelier, the Green party leader, called for Bardella to resign from all his political positions, describing him as "an obsessional antisemite" who now presents himself as the Jews' greatest defender. The contradiction at the heart of the moment—a party built on antisemitism now claiming to protect Jews, led by a man whose teenage writings allegedly embodied the very hatred the party says it has abandoned—remains unresolved as the 2027 election approaches.