French investigative website Mediapart has published a long report claiming that Jordan Bardella, the president of the National Rally, made antisemitic and conspiratorial comments in private written conversations around ten years ago. The article went online on Monday afternoon.
Bardella has formally denied the claims. He says the documents are forgeries and accuses certain media outlets of playing “dirty tricks” to disrupt the presidential election campaign and damage his reputation. He has told his lawyer to begin the necessary legal steps.
Marine Le Pen has also rejected the report. The CRIF and the Socialist Party have reacted as well, and the story has revived debate over the party’s efforts to change its image.
What Mediapart Reported About Jordan Bardella
Mediapart’s report rests on private written exchanges. The website cites dozens of written conversations and says they show Bardella making antisemitic and conspiratorial remarks. According to the outlet, the messages were written between 2013 and 2015.
The report covers several themes: comments about Jewish people and banks, remarks on Israel and Zionism, criticism of French politicians, and praise for a well-known far-right ideologue. Each of these is described in the next section.
In French, the remarks at the centre of the story are called propos antisémites, which means antisemitic remarks. Mediapart presents them as private messages, not public speeches or interviews. Everything in the report is Mediapart’s account, and Bardella rejects it.
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The Private Conversations Mediapart Cites
Mediapart places the conversations between the summer of 2013 and 2015-2016. The report says Jordan Bardella had not yet turned 18 when some of the messages were written. The period also covers December 2015, when he was elected a regional councillor in Île-de-France.
On the content, Mediapart says some of the messages contain hostile comments about Jewish people. In one exchange, it says, Jordan Bardella complained about Jewish ownership of banks. Elsewhere, he is reported to have written that a Zionist is necessarily Jewish.
Other messages, according to Mediapart, complain that the most important ministries go to people for whom Israel and banking interests matter more than French interests. In these exchanges, the report says, he names Laurent Fabius, Pierre Moscovici and Manuel Valls.
Mediapart also reports admiring comments about Alain Soral. Soral is an ideologue who has repeatedly been found guilty of racist and antisemitic insults, and who left the FN, the former name of the National Rally, in 2009. One message quoted by Mediapart says his analyses are correct because everything in them is checked against the facts.
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Jordan Bardella’s Response
Bardella has formally denied the claims. He describes the documents Mediapart relies on as clear forgeries.
He also accuses certain media outlets of using “dirty tricks” to unsettle the presidential election campaign and harm his reputation. He says he has instructed his lawyer to take the necessary legal action.
The two accounts contradict each other directly. Mediapart attributes the messages to him. Bardella says the documents are fabricated.
Marine Le Pen Defends Bardella
Marine Le Pen also reacted strongly. Speaking at the Batimat trade fair, she said no normal person could believe “this madness.”
Le Pen has named Jordan Bardella as her choice for prime minister if she is elected president of the Republic in 2027. That makes the report part of the wider debate ahead of the presidential election, which is also the campaign Bardella says some outlets are trying to disrupt.
Earlier Controversies Involving Bardella
This is not the first time Jordan Bardella has faced accusations of this kind. In 2024, the programme Complément d’enquête accused him of posting racist and homophobic comments on an anonymous Twitter account between 2015 and 2017. Libération backed up the claim in its own reporting. Bardella has always denied being the author of that account.
In 2023, he said he did not think Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party’s founder, was antisemitic. After the uproar over those comments, he admitted the statement was “clumsy.”
Libération has also published articles about Bardella’s luxurious lifestyle and about differences between him and Marine Le Pen. Those reported differences were officially denied.
CRIF and Other Reactions to the Jordan Bardella Report
Reactions came quickly after Mediapart published its article. Yonathan Arfi, president of the CRIF, the representative council of France’s Jewish institutions, told AFP that the story shows the limits of the National Rally’s efforts to improve its image. He argued that the party is a stronghold of identitarians and conspiracy theorists, and that nothing fundamental has changed.
Olivier Faure, first secretary of the Socialist Party, took a sarcastic tone. He said it was now easier to understand why Bardella had said Jean-Marie Le Pen was not antisemitic, a reference to the 2023 comments.
These are political reactions. They reflect the views of the people who made them and are not findings about the documents themselves.
The National Rally’s Effort to Change Its Image
Marine Le Pen became party leader in 2011. Since then, the party, once known as the National Front, has tried to soften its image. A central part of that strategy has been to distance itself from the antisemitic positions of its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The party has still been caught up in rows over controversial comments made by candidates or elected officials. Jordan Bardella himself has called such people “black sheep,” and they are then quickly expelled from the movement.
How the Jordan Bardella Mediapart Report Is Shaping the Debate
The public debate so far follows the lines of the reactions. Mediapart says the private messages show antisemitic and conspiratorial views. Bardella and Marine Le Pen reject the report and the documents behind it. The CRIF president and the Socialist Party leader have used the story to question how much the National Rally has changed.
The story also lands ahead of the 2027 presidential election, in which Le Pen has named Bardella as her possible prime minister.
The documented facts at this stage are what each side has said. Mediapart has published its report, Jordan Bardella has denied it and called the documents forgeries, and he has told his lawyer to begin legal action.
