Jordan Bardella flew to America last week on a trip he had long boasted about. The president of the National Rally – and all his party – had been a little put out that the only French politicians invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration were Eric Zemmour and Sarah Knafo of the right-wing Reconquest.
It was with relish, then, that Bardella boarded a flight to Washington to attend the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Here was his party’s chance to announce itself to America, while rubbing shoulders with the representatives of the new zeitgeist: JD Vance, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, Giorgia Meloni, Argentine President Javier Milei, Blighty’s own Nigel Farage, and of course, the man himself, Donald J. Trump. Only, Bardella never took to the stage. He cancelled his appearance and flew back to France, accompanied by hoots of derision from many American conservatives.
Increasingly, it’s hard to know what exactly Le Pen or her party stands for
It all went wrong for Bardella when Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, addressed the audience on Thursday evening. During the course of the speech, Bannon made a gesture similar to the one Elon Musk made last month on the day Trump was inaugurated. Depending on one’s politics, the gesture of the pair is a harmless wave or a Nazi salute.
Bardella interpreted Bannon’s gesture as the latter – something Bannon denied – and consequently pulled out of the conference. ‘If that’s true, he’s unworthy to lead France,’ said Bannon. Accusing Bardella of being ‘a boy, not a man’, he also suggested the Frenchman made his decision so as not to upset ‘the mainstream media’.
Giorgia Meloni also came under pressure to pull out of the conference. Nicola Fratoianni, an Italian left-wing MP, said that to appear would validate ‘Trump’s America…[where] they have developed a taste for Nazi-fascist salutes’.
Meloni ignored the howls of protest and gave a speech that underlined her reputation as Trump’s closest ally in Europe; she endorsed Vance’s address earlier in the month at the Munich Security Conference, and she championed ‘Christian values’ and the ‘civilisational’ battle facing the West. The Italian PM also attacked the ‘mainstream propaganda machine’, accusing it peddling ‘storytelling that was fake’. She knows better than most, having been consistently branded a ‘fascist’ and the heir to Mussolini since becoming PM in 2022.
The abuse is ongoing. The French left-wing newspaper Le Monde seems to have a particular animus for Meloni; earlier this month it accused her of ‘disrupting democracy’, and in Monday’s edition it charged her government with clamping down on free speech by harassing journalists and broadcasters.
Meloni has talked for a couple of years of ‘purging’ some of the Italian media of what she regards as its innate left-wing bias. What is true of Italy is true of western Europe in general. In Belgium, things are so bad that the state broadcaster, RTBF, last month transmitted Trump’s inauguration speech with a time delay. Why? So that they could cut any remarks that were ‘politically dangerous’. Meanwhile in France, the country’s highest administrative court – the left-leaning Council of State – last week closed down a popular anti-Establishment TV station after it offended the Paris elite once too often.
Bardella has given in to this bias, one of several troubling signs in recent months that the National Rally has lost its raison d’etre in pursuit of respectability. It was noteworthy that Marine Le Pen made no comment on Vance’s Munich speech, just as she and her party had little to say when Trump was re-elected.
Into this ideological vacuum have stepped others, like Zemmour and Knafo, and Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal, an independent MEP. It’s fair to say that Marechal is the intellectual one of the pair. Le Pen has never been comfortable talking about Islamism or civilisational issues; she dodged a question on the subject last month. Marechal isn’t so timid, describing Vance’s performance in Munich as a ‘speech of truth’.
Increasingly, it’s hard to know what exactly Le Pen or her party stands for. They rage against immigration and insecurity, and France’s economic decline, but offer few coherent solutions. There is no confident vision, in comparison to Vance and Meloni.
Furthermore – and this is key to understanding Bardella’s reaction to Bannon – the party is still in thrall to the legacy media. Trump and his team understood long ago the power and reach of the alternative media. Le Pen has never appeared on one of the many right-leaning political podcasts in France. Whereas Meloni stands up to the ‘mainstream propaganda machine’, Le Pen takes the knee.
Bardella has sported a beard since the start of the year, perhaps an attempt to add gravitas to his 29-year-old face. But it’s intellectual gravitas he requires. It would also help his cause if he and Le Pen learned to speak English.
In the brief time he was in Washington, Bardella gave an interview to an American broadcast – in French. Meloni spoke to CPAC delegates in English, as did the German AfD’s Alice Weidel when she was interviewed by Elon Musk last month.
Marion Marechal is comfortable in English, so too Sarah Knafo and a host of other prominent European anti-Progressives such as Robert Fico, Geert Wilders and Viktor Orban. The National Rally needs to get over its Anglophobia. It doesn’t make them look cool and Gallic, but backwards and obstinate.
Back in France, Bardella visited the salon de l’agriculture on Sunday in Paris, the celebrated annual agricultural fair. He was in his element, posing for selfies with his starry-eyed young fans. As one newspaper put it, Bardella ‘wants people to forget his American failure’.
And it was a failure, one of his own making. Instead of brushing off the Bannon kerfuffle, Bardella bowed to the outrage of the mainstream media and scuttled home with his tail between his legs. Now the ‘outrage’ of the media has turned to mockery at the way they made Bardella dance to their tune.
He and his party need to study how Team Trump deal with much of the legacy media in America. They laugh at it and taunt it, like Vance did when he appeared at CPAC. Discussing the energy exhibited by the President in his first 30 days in office, Vance remarked: ‘I do think that we’ve had more executive orders than CNN has viewers each night, so hello to our friends at CNN’.
The ratings of CNN are in freefall in the States (down 47 per cent) because viewers have tired of their hectoring. It’s all part of the ‘vibe shift’ underway in the West, except, apparently in France. Bardella and Le Pen need to move with the times. Progressives are passé.
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