69% of his party’s supporters consider that Bardella is a better candidate for the Elysée

Both Jean-Marie like his daughter Marine They have led the extreme right in France for fifty years… and when the National Front finally seems to be at the doors of the promised land of the Elysée, they can slam shut in their faces.

This is suggested by the survey by the firm Odoxa, in which the numbers of Jordan Bardella Le Pen’s results are much better among all electorates.

Surprisingly, also among the voters of the National Rally coalition, where his party is a member.

45% of French people have a good opinion of him, of which 40% assure that they will vote for him, something unprecedented until now in a far-right party and which points to a probable electoral victory in next year’s presidential elections.

Among the conservatives, up to 80% of those close to the National Rally say they are sure of voting for him – with 70% who would definitely vote for Le Pen – and 12% of the Republicans – the lifelong Gaullist UMP – would also vote for him if he ended up being the candidate.

However, the hardest fact for the leader of the French nationalist right is that, even within her electorate, voters prefer Bardella.

According to the demographic company Odoxa, 69% of National Rally supporters consider Bardella to be the better candidate, while 31% remain with Le Pen.

This is undoubtedly influenced by his youth – he is 30 years old – and the fact that he has stayed away from his party’s financing scandals.

The man who stood up to Steve Bannon

And corruption has wreaked havoc on the French right over the last two decades.

To the imprisonment of the former president Nicolas Sarkozy we must add the scandals of François Fillon that cost him the presidency in 2017 and the conviction of Le Pen herself, disqualified from voting for five years for diverting European funds to finance her party.

The good news for Le Pen is that the French prosecutor’s office backed down this week when it came to applying said disqualification, in addition to contemplating the possibility of it being less than what was initially set.

We will wait for the Court of Appeal to decide whether or not to uphold the conviction, which, if the deadlines are extended, could allow the leader of the National Front to run as a candidate.

The problem is that the accusation has already permeated the French collective imagination and Le Pen’s own speech has varied over time.

If in March 2025 her defense was based on the accusation of the “system” and the assertion that everything was a political operation against her, a year later the tone has softened.

Now Le Pen recognizes that there could have been a crime of embezzlement… but assures that there was no intention on her part.

Even if this argument serves to reduce the sentence, it is difficult for it to serve to regain the trust of the voter.

Bardella, however, has an immaculate image, to the point that he faced Steve Bannon when he gave the Nazi salute at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which earned him a lot of criticism from the MAGA movement… but glowing praise in France.

Bardella has a more moderate air than Le Pen and, above all, breaks with the tradition of the cursed surname.

There are people who swore never to vote for a Le Pen, but they may vote for a Bardella even if the ideas are exactly the same.

Édouard Philippe, the great rival on the “horizon”

Even so, it must be remembered that, for the National Front, Marine Le Pen continues to be “option A” and Bardella would only be her circumstantial substitute if the justice system endorsed the disqualification.

Le Pen took the baton from her father – whom she later harshly confronted, especially due to Jean-Marie’s sympathy for anti-Semitism and the Nazi “final solution” – in 2011, when the party seemed to be collapsing and barely had 10% of the votes.

Thanks to their attempts to “normalize” the discourse of the extreme right and, of course, the economic aid of Vladimir PutinMarine almost doubled her father’s results in 2012 and achieved her great success in 2014, when, for the first time, the National Front won elections at the state level, in this case, the European ones.

Since then, his party, already integrated into the National Rally, has repeated its victory in 2019 and 2024, in addition to sneaking into the second round of the presidential elections in 2017 and 2022.

Although both times she was defeated by Emmanuel MacronIn the latter, Le Pen obtained more than thirteen million votes.

His father had never exceeded six million.

Looking ahead to 2027, with Le Pen or Bardella as candidates, the polls place the National Rally at the top and without much competition. In the first round, he could even double the second competitor… and in the second round, he starts as a favorite against Gaullists, socialists and centrists.

The only one who seems to be able to confront the threat of the extreme right would be Édouard Philippe.

The former prime minister leads the Horizontes coalition, which we could describe as center-right, moving further to the right to differentiate itself from Macron.

In the past legislative elections, he reached an agreement with Los Republicanos to support each other in the second rounds and it is likely that this agreement would be reissued in the presidential elections if the case arises.

Raphaël Gluksmannthe social democratic leader, could also have a chance… but first he would have to defeat Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the fight for the left, something that, in times of extremes, cannot be taken for granted.