French political party leader Jordan Bardella has formally denied claims published by investigative news site Mediapart attributing antisemitic statements to him from 2013, announcing that he has filed a defamation lawsuit.
The online publication released an investigation on Monday, September 28, alleging that private messages written by Bardella during the summer of 2013 contained explicit antisemitic language. At the time, Bardella was a teenage activist within the party then known as the Front National.
Mediapart stated that it had authenticated private written conversations from that period in which Bardella allegedly claimed that Jewish people must dominate, crush, and rob other peoples, adding that a Zionist was necessarily Jewish.
Responding by email to inquiries from Mediapart, Bardella formally disputed having ever made racist or antisemitic statements in public or in private, whether orally or in writing. He noted that he was not an active militant within the party during the summer of 2013 and was still a minor at the time, arguing that those facts demonstrated the false nature of the sources.
Bardella described the purported messages as crude forgeries and characterized the publication as a dirty tricks operation intended to damage his reputation.
Defamation complaint and party response
Speaking later on news channel CNews on Monday evening, Bardella confirmed that he had instructed his attorney to file a formal defamation complaint against Mediapart.
Earlier in the day, his attorney David Dassa-Le Deist appeared on television news channel LCI in an interview with journalist Darius Rochebin. Dassa-Le Deist stated that Bardella was not the author of the ignoble comments attributed to him by the publication.
Dassa-Le Deist said his client's honor had been damaged and promised that the legal response would match the severity of the allegations. The attorney suggested that former party members who had been evicted in previous years might be driven by a strong desire for revenge against the movement.
Marine Le Pen, the presidential candidate for Rassemblement National who intends to appoint Bardella as Prime Minister if she wins the presidency, dismissed the investigative report while attending the Batimat construction trade show in Paris.
Le Pen characterized the claims as crazy accusations, telling reporters that she did not even need to discuss the matter with Bardella. She added that nobody could believe such madness, insisting that the allegations lacked any credibility.
Background on Bardella and Rassemblement National
Jordan Bardella, born in 1995, rose rapidly through the ranks of the French far right to become president of Rassemblement National in 2022. He succeeded Marine Le Pen at the head of the party as part of a broader effort to modernize its public image and expand its electoral appeal across France.
The political party was founded in 1972 under the name Front National by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the father of Marine Le Pen. Jean-Marie Le Pen led the organization for nearly four decades and accumulated multiple court convictions for hate speech and Holocaust denial, including referring to Nazi gas chambers as a detail of history.
Marine Le Pen assumed leadership of the Front National in 2011 and subsequently expelled her father from the party in 2015 to distance the movement from its historic antisemitic associations. The party was formally renamed Rassemblement National in 2018.
Under the French constitutional system, the elected President of the Republic serves as head of state from the Élysée Palace in Paris. The President appoints the Prime Minister, who leads the government from the Matignon Palace. Le Pen has repeatedly designated Bardella as her candidate for Prime Minister in future government arrangements.
Political opposition calls for accountability
The investigation by Mediapart quickly drew sharp condemnation from political opponents across the French left, including several prominent figures preparing for presidential campaigns.
Olivier Faure, a candidate in the Socialist Party primary, commented on social media platform X that the allegations helped explain why Bardella had previously claimed that Jean-Marie Le Pen was not antisemitic.
Fabien Roussel, the candidate for the French Communist Party, expressed a similar sentiment on social media, stating that the spiritual children of Le Pen would never change their fundamental views.
Marine Tondelier, candidate for the Ecologists, issued a formal statement calling on Bardella to resign immediately from all of his political functions. Tondelier argued that anyone influenced by the videos and antisemitic writings of Alain Soral had no place in Matignon or the Élysée Palace.
Alain Soral is a French far-right essayist and political commentator who has faced numerous criminal convictions in French courts for Holocaust denial, antisemitic insult, and incitement to racial hatred.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, candidate for the left-wing party La France Insoumise, stated on X on Monday evening that a terrible accusation weighed heavily against Bardella.
Mélenchon urged Bardella to demonstrate clear opposition to the antisemitic and conspiracy statements attributed to him. He warned that failure to do so would prove that critics were correct when they argued that the far right had never truly severed ties with its antisemitic origins.
