The truth about Jordan Bardella’s housing estate upbringing and Muslim roots

A tall homebody who dreamt of becoming a policeman: this is how Jordan Bardella is remembered today by old school friends and neighbours in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis where he grew up.

The 28-year-old – who is now the president of France’s hard-Right National Rally (RN) and on course to become the country’s youngest ever prime minister if the party clinches a majority in Sunday’s second round of parliamentary elections – took personal safety so seriously, they say, that he spent seven years learning the Japanese martial art of aikido.

But the young man’s interest in law enforcement was not simply born out of a sense of public duty. It was a reaction to a violent uprising that went on to shape his politics.

In October 2005, two French teenage boys from Paris’s large African immigrant population were on their way home from a football game close to where Bardella lived when a police car approached them for an identity check and they fled, hiding out in a power substation, where they were electrocuted and died.

Riots broke out among so-called “banlieusards”, or suburban youths. Hundreds of buildings, including gyms, libraries and community centres, were set alight, 8,000 vehicles were destroyed and policemen were attacked in the streets. A state of emergency was declared countrywide.

More than 2,760 people were eventually arrested.

Bardella, an only child, was 10 years old at the time, living with his mother, Luisa (his parents having long separated), in a tower block on Saint-Denis’s Gabriel Péri housing estate, 10 miles from the place where the boys died. Now, two decades on, he has continued to refer to those riots.

“The ghost of 2005 hovers over France again,” he wrote in a communiqué originally published online in 2017. “Entering a culture of avoidance and submission, the state has allowed lawless zones to be formed throughout the territory, where crime, hatred of France and our values ​​have taken root.”

Ana Da Silva, a retired secretary, has lived on the Péri – as it is nicknamed – for three decades; she remembers a young Bardella well. “He was scared, so stayed indoors,” she says. “Lots of kids were directly involved in the arson and fighting, but not him. He was too cautious to get involved in any trouble. He was much happier staying in with his mum, sitting in front of his computer.”

She adds: “As he got older, he looked more like a policeman – very tall, and extremely neat, as if he was in uniform. Even his jeans looked ironed.”

François Le Pourhiet, a chef, is an old school friend of Bardella – the pair used to spend hours glued to PlayStation consoles, he says, blowing imaginary enemies to pieces on the military game Call of Duty.

He recalls that Bardella “dreamt of being a police officer” and interned at the local police station when he was 15.

Bardella’s mother still lives in the Péri, in the same flat where he spent his childhood. She is 62 now, a nursery school assistant, and, by all accounts, she has always been hugely protective of her son.

“Jordan’s mum paid for an entrance swipe card to an attached building with a shared internal door so he didn’t have to confront [local hooligans] in their own foyer when he got home from school,” says Sandrine, another Péri resident, who asked to be identified by her first name only.

“The two were devoted to each other, and remain very close, although you never see Jordan around here anymore.”

I first met Bardella during his European Parliament election campaign. It was 2019, I was reporting for a British newspaper and we met at the old headquarters of the Front National (as the National Rally used to be called) in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. He was serious and straight to the point, no small talk, and he was accompanied by a great deal of security, some plain-clothed and all towering like him. (He’s 6ft 2in.)

On the numerous occasions I’ve come across him since, he has retained the same neat poise – dark blue suit and tie, short-back-and-sides haircut and gleaming brogues, the air of a young 1950s detective from a television drama.

Even now that he is something of a Gen-Z influencer, having amassed 790,000 Instagram followers and a further 1.8 million on TikTok, the clean-shaven image remains – there is no sign of a hipster beard.

In person, his demeanour is remarkably gentle, though awkward questions tend to be met with a terse gaze, and a dismissive, “I’m here to talk about the future”.

There is little nostalgia for the Péri, either, a place he describes as one of France’s “lost territories”.

Luisa Bertelli-Mota moved there in 1997, two years after the birth of her son, having lived with Jordan during his first years in the neighbouring town of Drancy, where thousands of French Jews were interned during the Second World War before being sent to Third Reich concentration camps. Monuments in the area stand testament to this dark period in history.

The Front National (FN) – the party that Bardella joined as a teenager – has minimal support in Saint-Denis, not least because of its historic links to Nazism. One of its founding members was Pierre Bousquet, who had sworn an oath to Adolf Hitler as a corporal in the paramilitary Waffen-SS. The party’s more famous founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, meanwhile, had various convictions for inciting racial hatred and denying or minimising the Holocaust.

Le Pen was honorary president when Bardella signed up to the party. Just 16 at the time, he needed a letter from his mother to permit it.

In the years since, while campaigning, he has denounced “migrant overwhelm” and “Islamism”. “The situation here in Seine-Saint-Denis perhaps foreshadows what the whole of Île-de-France will be like tomorrow, and the whole of France the day after tomorrow, if we do not quickly take the destiny of our country back into our own hands,” he once said.

“What made me start putting up posters in the Cité des Bosquets [a housing estate] in Montfermeil at the age of 16 is obviously the situation of migratory submersion and communitarianism that we are experiencing in these territories, and the urgency to defend our identity,” he continued.

And yet his mother was an immigrant to France, while his paternal great-grandfather – who immigrated from Algeria in the 1930s – was Muslim.

Luisa arrived from Turin in the 1960s and met Olivier Bardella, who was of Algerian-Italian stock. Olivier’s own father, Guerrino Bardella, now 80, is a Muslim convert and has settled in Casablanca with his Moroccan wife.

“You never hear Mr Bardella talking about family links with North Africa, let alone Muslims,” argues Nabila Ramdani, the French-Algerian author of Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic.

Ramdani grew up on an estate close to Bardella’s, and she has her own views about Bardella’s origin story. “He makes out that he’s the poor banlieusard boy made good, but it doesn’t stack up.” She points out that his father is a wealthy businessman who runs a vending machines company.

Growing up, Jordan used to spend weekends and Wednesday evenings with his father in his upmarket home in the commuter town of Montmorency.

There were beach holidays to Florida and elsewhere; a new Smart car when Bardella was old enough to drive; and a privileged education at two private schools – Saint Vincent de Paul, and then La Salle Saint-Denis (known as JBS).

Bardella did extremely well at JBS, achieving 16.5 out of 20 in his baccalaureate (broadly equivalent to straight As at A-level). Later, he began studying geography at Paris-Sorbonne University, but dropped out, apparently to focus on politics.

By his early 20s, with a few weeks working for his father on his CV, Bardella immersed himself in the FN, styling himself as their banlieue specialist, and was soon considered an expert on out-of-town housing estates.

His first serious girlfriend, Kelly Betesh, then 19, posed in an FN poster in 2015. In it she wore French tricolour face paint, and alongside her was a woman wearing an Islamic veil. The slogan read: “Choisissez votre banlieue” – “choose your neighbourhood”.

“We no longer want this black-white-Arab suburb that the elites who rule us have been trying to impose on us for 30 years,” Bardella said when out campaigning that year. “We want a blue-white-and-red suburb in which we feel French.”

Some former teachers and pupils from JBS say they had no idea he was an FN member when he was at school. “I was flabbergasted,” says Chantal Chatelain, a teacher when Bardella was there. “When you come out of an institution that taught you respect for others, how can you make xenophobic comments?”

Today, JBS educates as many Muslims as Catholics, and its 2,400-plus registered students comprise 10 nationalities. Bardella himself took part in community action sessions during his schooling, helping to teach French to newly arrived immigrants.

By 2015, however, Bardella was running a group called Banlieues Patriots, which sought to attract residents in diverse neighbourhoods outside Paris. French media reported that leaflets handed out read: “Muslims, maybe, but French first”.

All of this is said to have caught the attention of the FN hierarchy, notably Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, who in 2018 rebranded the party as Rally National (RN), having pledged to “detoxify” its reputation. Bardella would become part of that new image.

They are said to have met in 2017. Within days of being introduced, Le Pen appointed him party spokesman.

Today, she calls him her “lion cub”. Le Pen, meanwhile, is the woman Bardella admires most, after his mother.

“He adores Marine, and is devoted to her politics,” says an FN party veteran, who retains close links within the RN. “She turned him into her protegé, pretty much from their first meeting.”

Initially, Bardella focused on social policy on the estates. But he has since made clear his views on myriad topics, revealing some radical ideas, such as abolishing income tax for the under-30s.

One of his central ambitions is to abolish droit du sol, which bestows French citizenship on anyone born in France. Droit du sol has existed since 1515, and became fundamental to Gallic identity after the 1789 Revolution. The Conseil d’État – the highest court in the land – has ruled all previous attempts to abolish it unconstitutional, but Bardella appears determined.

Meanwhile, Bardella’s RN rise has been meteoric. By 2019 he was an MEP, and in 2022 became party president; all the while taking his orders directly from Le Pen.

Even his love interests have been linked to Le Pen. His current girlfriend is rumoured to be her niece, Nolwenn Olivier, whose father, Philippe Olivier, was one of Le Pen’s closest advisers when she took over from her father as party leader.

An RN source says: “Jordan’s relationship with Nolwenn is currently on-off. You’re more likely to see him out campaigning with Nolwenn’s mum and dad than taking her out for a romantic meal.”

Today, much of Bardella’s domestic life is shrouded in secrecy. He owns a bachelor pad in the Val-d’Oise, north of the big Paris housing estates, and he enjoys cooking French, and sometimes Italian, food. His live-in bodyguards are said to be his dining companions – they are on duty 24 hours a day. (Threats to the Le Pen family when Marine was growing up included a bomb exploding at the family’s Paris home, so none of the hierarchy takes any chances.)

Bardella’s social media posts no doubt occupy much of his time, though they mostly focus on electioneering, with few glimpses into his home life.

Pascal Humeau, a media adviser who worked with Bardella for four years, calls him “an empty shell” and “a cyborg” who does what Le Pen tells him to.

Certain opponents have gone a step further, claiming that he is a reactionary one-trick pony and obsessed with immigrants on housing estates. Mathieu Hanotin, the current mayor of Saint-Denis, argues that Bardella’s “past simply allows him to show off, and to exploit a neighborhood where he no longer lives”.

But not everyone appears to agree, including many of France’s young voters. A survey conducted for national newspaper Le Monde earlier this year found that 32 per cent of those aged 18-24 intend to vote for him.

As for Bardella, he shows no sign of changing his focus. “I am in politics because of everything I lived through there,” he has previously said of Saint-Denis. “To stop that becoming the norm for the whole of France. Because what happens there is not normal.”