The uneasy tandem leading France's far right

Jordan Bardella has been relegated to second billing by Marine Le Pen ahead of next year's presidential vote

Jordan Bardella's third book in three years was conceived as a presidential campaign manifesto in case his mentor Marine Le Pen was barred from running and he had to take her place.

Instead, Governing, launched last week, highlights the predicament of the 31-year-old far-right leader after Le Pen was found guilty in a fraud case but spared a long electoral ban, allowing her to reclaim her place as the Rassemblement National's presidential candidate.

Bardella was relegated to his old role as party chief and prospective prime minister, with Le Pen reviving her pitch for an American-style RN "ticket" that would put her in the Élysée Palace and him in Matignon.

"I may have taken it hard," Bardella conceded tersely in the book, confirming what had been plain to see the day after the ruling, when he appeared tense and unhappy alongside Le Pen during a walkabout in the Loire Valley.

Bardella, who is president of the Patriots for Europe group in the European parliament, admitted he had prepared for and pictured himself as president. Yet in public, he consistently cast Le Pen as the natural candidate and himself as her understudy.

"Always careful to not be seen as disloyal or clumsy, I would answer what we had decided on together," he wrote.

Le Pen has lodged a final appeal with France's highest court, the Cour de Cassation, risking further upheaval if it confirms her conviction before the April vote, as she could be subject to house arrest with an ankle bracelet.

Legal experts are also divided over whether the lower court's five-year ban could still disqualify Le Pen before the Court of Cassation delivers its final ruling, an interpretation rejected by the chief prosecutor.

Meanwhile, the RN has been rocked by internal tensions and policy disputes that have exposed cracks in the longstanding portrayal of Le Pen and Bardella as politically interchangeable.

Le Pen's inner circle, known as the "Marinistes", has regained influence at the expense of Bardella's allies, despite his re-election as party leader last month with 99 per cent of the vote.

One of Le Pen's nieces will oversee campaign communications, while her brother-in-law Philippe Olivier will lead strategy and speechwriting. Her once-estranged niece Marion Maréchal, an ultra-conservative EU lawmaker married to an Italian MEP from Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's party, has also been brought back into the fold.

Bardella's business-friendly proposals, including scrapping the statutory retirement age and introducing personal investment accounts, have been overshadowed by Le Pen's preference for a more generous welfare state. She wants to lower the retirement age for some workers to 60, from about 63 today.

Another sign of Le Pen's renewed authority was the ousting of François Durvye, an adviser who had helped the RN court business leaders but whom she regarded as disloyal.

"The recomposition was rough since many and even Marine herself thought she would not be able to run," said one RN ally. "It was difficult for Jordan but they have moved past it now. Both know that nothing would be worse for the campaign than a rift."

The book, published by Fayard, an imprint owned by conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré, does not mention tensions between the pair. It also offers little reflection on the RN's setbacks under Bardella's leadership, including its repeated selection of candidates later exposed as holding antisemitic or racist views.

Bardella was forced to add three pages to the book after investigative outlet Mediapart reported in September on antisemitic private messages he allegedly sent as a teenage activist.

He again vehemently denied the allegations, portraying them as politically motivated attacks on the frontrunner RN. "The blows are getting harsher, and the attacks are getting personal," he wrote.

Outside his glitzy Paris book launch, protesters chanted through a megaphone: "Bardella, your antisemitism cannot be erased!" Such disruptions could dog his nationwide book tour, although the allegations have so far left Bardella's and Le Pen's poll ratings unscathed.

Although writing books is de rigueur for French politicians, Bardella's first two became bestsellers, earning him about €1mn since 2024.

His debut, What I Am Looking For, recounted his upbringing in the poor, immigrant suburb of Saint-Denis, where exposure to drugs and crime drove him to join the RN at 16. His second, What the French Want, offered portraits of people he met on his travels, including a farmer who railed against an "obese" state stifling his business.

The first half of Governing reads like a diary, with Bardella attending an Élysée crisis meeting on soaring energy prices, visiting the Poland-Belarus border to deplore lax security and falling in love with an Italian princess, Maria Carolina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies.

But the book also paints a near-apocalyptic portrait of a France that he says has lost control of its borders, its finances and its destiny, while a disconnected political class flounders. Only the RN can come to the rescue, he argues.

Bardella casts his youth as a political asset, taking a swipe at two septuagenarian prime ministers whom the RN helped bring down. "In the great history of France, age was always secondary," he writes, noting that Napoleon was just 27 at the Battle of Arcole and Louis XIV was 22 when he "decided to rule alone".

In brief portraits of Emmanuel Macron's seven prime ministers, Bardella takes aim at presidential hopeful Édouard Philippe, likening him to "a criminal who returns to the scene pretending to be the detective".

In the second half, Bardella sets out the RN's agenda for power: curbing immigration, cracking down on crime and restoring state authority.

He pledges to govern through referendums, rarely used in France, but glosses over the legal obstacles that could thwart such plans.

"The time has come to govern with the people and the referendum must become a natural part of the democratic process," he writes. "We will start with the one that will determine the future of the country more than others: immigration."