France's National Rally is fighting a fresh antisemitism scandal after an investigative outlet published messages it attributes to party president Jordan Bardella, who denies writing them and has sued for defamation.
France's opposition National Rally (RN) is confronting its most damaging internal crisis in years after an investigative outlet published private messages it says were written by party president Jordan Bardella as a teenager, messages the outlet describes as antisemitic and conspiratorial. Bardella, 31, flatly denies writing them and has filed a defamation suit, calling the report a political ambush timed to derail the party's run at the presidency. The dispute now shadows a race that Marine Le Pen had been leading with unusual comfort.
The outlet, Mediapart, published its findings on September 28 and followed up in the days since with screenshots it says corroborate the messages. The RN dismisses the material as fabricated. The fight has drawn in senior government figures, France's main Jewish umbrella group and, at least implicitly, President Emmanuel Macron, lifting a party dispute into a national argument about the far right's attempt to reinvent itself.
Mediapart said it reviewed dozens of private messages from 2013 to 2015, the early years of Bardella's involvement with the National Front (FN), the party later rebranded as the RN. The outlet said it authenticated the exchanges and supported them with testimony from former party colleagues, whom it identified only by first name and last initial.
Among the messages attributed to Bardella was a claim that "all the banks are owned by Jews," a line invoking a long-standing antisemitic trope about financial control. Another reportedly read: "The Jew has to dominate other peoples, crush them, and rob them." A third described a "New World Order dominated by Israel, with Jerusalem as the capital."
Bardella was 17 or 18 at the time, according to the report. He said on X that he "formally" rejected the allegations and described them as "crude forgeries." Speaking on broadcaster CNews, he said his lawyer had filed a defamation suit and framed the disclosure as an effort to "destabilise the campaign" and to "kill me off politically." Mediapart, a left-leaning outlet with a long record of unearthing French political scandals, stands by its reporting.
The allegations strike at the core of the RN's decade-long project of "de-demonization," the deliberate effort to sand down the party's extremist edges and make it palatable to mainstream voters. Bardella has been the polished face of that makeover: telegenic, disciplined and careful to distance the party from the antisemitism associated with its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
In 2025 Bardella made an unprecedented visit to Israel, the first by a French far-right leader, part of a bid to show that the RN had changed. The party has also courted Jewish voters and sought to present itself as a firm defender of Israel.
Critics say the scandal exposes the limits of that rebranding. The president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), Yonathan Arfi, called the reported remarks extreme, saying antisemitism cannot be waved away as youthful indiscretion. France's anti-discrimination minister, Aurore Berge, said the comments, if authenticated, would be "extremely serious." Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot went further, arguing that antisemitism is not an aberration for the party but "the very history" of it.
The RN has faced this problem before. A run of racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic remarks by some of its candidates damaged its hopes of winning a parliamentary majority in 2024. Bardella pledged afterward to screen candidates more aggressively, promising to remove anyone with a history of toxic statements.
The story lands at a delicate moment. Bardella had been the party's de facto presidential standard-bearer until July, when a French court cleared Le Pen to run after a conviction tied to misuse of European Union funds had threatened her candidacy. With Le Pen restored, Bardella's role shifted: he is now in line to serve as prime minister if she wins.
Her position looks strong. A Toluna-Harris survey for RTL and M6, published the same day Mediapart's report appeared, put Le Pen at roughly 35 to 36 percent in a first round of voting, enough to advance comfortably. The same poll suggested she would defeat either the left's Jean-Luc Melenchon or the centrist Edouard Philippe in a runoff. France's presidential election is set for April 18 and May 2, 2027.
The RN also scored a symbolic win in France's upper-house Senate elections, taking enough seats to form a faction in the chamber for the first time. French commentators treated it as a breakthrough for the movement and a warning to the parties that have long kept it at arm's length.
Against that momentum, the antisemitism dispute hands the party's opponents a familiar line of attack just as the campaign begins to take shape. Macron, whose final budget depends on a fractured parliament, pressed for clarity over the remarks, adding a governing dimension to what started as a media controversy.
Three questions will determine whether the scandal leaves a mark. The first is the defamation case: French proceedings move slowly, but a decision on the authenticity of the messages would settle the factual dispute that both sides are now arguing in public.
The second is whether the allegations change the RN's standing with Jewish voters and with the broader electorate it has worked to court. The party's pitch has rested on the idea that it has changed, and a sustained scandal tests that claim at the worst possible time.
The third is Le Pen herself. She has dismissed the report as a "dirty trick" and defended her protege, but she carries her own history on the issue, and how she handles the fallout will shape her campaign. France's fiscal fragility, a restive parliament and a wounded far right all point to an unpredictable year ahead of the vote.
France's National Rally is fighting a fresh antisemitism scandal after an investigative outlet published messages it attributes to party president Jordan Bardella, who denies writing them and has sued for defamation.
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