Bardella Denies Mediapart Report of Antisemitic Chats from 2013

Jordan Bardella, 31, the president of France's far-right Rassemblement National, on Monday denied an investigative report alleging that he expressed virulent antisemitism in private written conversations more than a decade ago. Contacted by the investigative website Mediapart before publication, Bardella called the reported chats "grotesque forgeries" and denounced what he described as a dirty-tricks operation.

The report, published on September 28, says it draws on dozens of written conversations from the summer of 2013, when Bardella was 17 or 18 and had joined the party, then known as the National Front, about a year and a half earlier. Mediapart says it authenticated the material independently. The following year, according to the report, he became head of the party's branch in Seine-Saint-Denis, the northern Paris suburbs.

According to Mediapart, the conversations are full of antisemitic conspiracy theories. In one, Bardella is quoted as writing that "all banks are owned by Jews." In another, he is quoted as writing: "The Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them and rob them, a Zionist is necessarily a Jew, and deeply so. In France, two fine examples are Bernard-Henri Lévy or Jacques Attali. And that's what they want, a new world order dominated by Israel, with, of course, Jerusalem as the capital."

Other messages cited by the site read: "The most important ministries go to people for whom Israel and banking interests take precedence over French interests," and "Zionism and banking domination are linked (Goldman Sachs, Rothschild, Lehman Brothers...)." The report says Bardella took care to keep the remarks private, noting that as Marine Le Pen's rhetoric grew more polished, the party's voter base was expanding while it "remains true to its core ideology." In the chats, he is said to have praised the "analyses" of antisemitic essayist Alain Soral and the "real battle of ideas" waged by former comedian Dieudonné, who has been repeatedly convicted of inciting antisemitism and racial hatred.

The denial

Bardella rejected the allegations outright. In a post on X, he said he formally denied ever making racist or antisemitic remarks of the kind described, in public or in private, orally or in writing, and announced that he would take legal action against Mediapart, according to AFP. He called the published conversations blatant falsehoods.

Marine Le Pen backed him at a housing conference the same day. She called the story "madness" and said it could only be "a fake, a manipulation, a dirty trick," according to Le Monde. Mediapart and the RN have clashed repeatedly in the past.

What is at stake

The report lands at a delicate moment for Bardella. He is widely presented as Le Pen's choice for prime minister if she wins the 2027 presidential election, and he has climbed to the top of popularity rankings for French political leaders. Asked about the prime minister talk in an interview with L'Opinion published the day before the report, he stayed cautious, saying it was not a done deal.

A normalization strategy under pressure

Since the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel, the RN has cast itself as a bulwark against antisemitism, which it says is mainly found on the left. Bardella reinforced that posture two years ago with a trip to Jerusalem that included a private audience with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a private tour of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

That record is contested. An annual survey by France's National Consultative Commission on Human Rights finds that antisemitic stereotypes remain deeply entrenched among RN voters, according to Le Monde, and the party is regularly called out over antisemitic statements by its officials and candidates, past and recent.

Old controversies resurface

Bardella was elected a Paris region councilor in 2015, the year an account later attributed to him posted a message paying homage to Soral. In 2024, the investigative television program Complément d'Enquête attributed that pro-Le Pen Twitter account to Bardella; he denied using it but never filed a complaint against the program, according to Le Monde.

The report dwells on Soral's orbit. Soral had left the party's central committee in 2009 but remained influential among its members. One of Bardella's close associates at the time, François Paradol, who is now his chief of staff, left Soral's Égalité et Réconciliation movement in the early 2010s, as he confirmed to Mediapart in a 2025 investigation. And Donatien Véret, a speechwriter who joined Bardella's inner circle in 2017, had recommended Soral's conspiratorial book Comprendre l'Empire in an internal document ahead of the 2012 presidential election, according to a Libération report.

The allegations cap a week crowded with political flashpoints, from youth protests moving online in Togo to a legal fight over a taxpayer-funded ad in Washington.

Bardella says he will take Mediapart to court, which means the authentication of the conversations may be tested before a judge. For a party that has spent years casting itself as a shield against antisemitism, the coming weeks will show whether that image holds.