France’s Le Pen defiant after top ally hit by anti-Semitism claims

PARIS – French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen on Sept 29 vowed to hit back at allegations of anti-Semitism targeting her de facto No. 2 Jordan Bardella, which have punctured her buoyant campaign at a time when she is riding high in the polls.

Le Pen, who is aiming to win the Elysee at her fourth attempt in 2027 in a far-right breakthrough that would send a shockwave across Europe, lambasted the Mediapart website that published the claims and said Bardella has her “total confidence”.

Bardella, who has vehemently denied the making the comments dating back to 2013, said the report marked the start of a “total war” to derail Le Pen’s campaign and said he was taking legal action against Mediapart.

The 31-year-old is the leader of Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) party and is tipped to be prime minister if she wins the presidency. A savvy user of social media, he has helped the RN make inroads among the youth vote.

Le Pen reaffirmed she had “total confidence” in her young lieutenant and vowed the RN would “counter-attack” after the allegations.

She warned “our opponents will do absolutely anything – including the most disgusting things – to try to derail this momentum” ahead of the 2027 election for a successor to centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

A poll published on Sept 28 suggested that Le Pen would easily lead the first round of voting in the elections in 2027, and would defeat any challenger in the second round run-off to win the Elysee.

She is planning to stand despite a conviction for a fake jobs scam in the European Parliament, a case Le Pen also says was falsified by opponents.

“Now, I think it’s Mediapart that needs to be told to put on its Kevlar vest, because there will obviously be a response to the way they are behaving,” she said.

The party also scored a notable political breakthrough at the weekend by winning enough seats in the French Senate – which is chosen by elected local officials – to form a parliamentary group in the upper house for the first time.

“We are seeing the beginnings of a total war, an attempt to destabilise the presidential campaign,” Bardella, flanked by Le Pen, told party deputies, saying he believed the allegations were an operation prepared “for several months”.

Responding to suggestions the allegations could have come from individuals expelled from the RN in a purge of extremists, he said: “Either Mediapart orchestrated this, or Mediapart itself was tricked by powerful figures behind the scenes with an interest in destabilising the presidential campaign.”

He denounced what he called a bid to “kill my political career”.

Mediapart’s investigation is built on comments in private chats allegedly written by Bardella in the summer of 2013 when he was 17 or 18 years old. Mediapart maintains it authenticated the comments. It did not specify where the messages had been written nor publish screenshots.

According to the report by Mediapart, Bardella wrote, among other comments, in a chat: “The Jew has to dominate other peoples, crush them, and rob them; a Zionist is necessarily a Jew, and fundamentally so.”

He was also alleged to have written “all the banks are owned by Jews”.

Bardella has been a key player in Le Pen’s project of “de-demonisation” to make the RN into an electable force and rid the party of the legacy of her father, the late Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded and led what was then known as the National Front (FN) and repeatedly made anti-Semitic remarks.

Bardella made an unprecedented visit to Israel in 2025, the first by a French far-right leader, in a bid to demonstrate the RN’s new credentials.

Watching from the sidelines, Julien Aubert, the vice-president of the right-wing Republicans, commented wryly: “There is going to be one corpse in all this.”

“Either Mediapart is right – in which case I do not see how Jordan Bardella can continue – or the whole thing is a great dirty trick and then Mediapart has taken a great risk,” he told Radio J. AFP