National Rally figurehead Jordan Bardella hit back at French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday, after Macron called reports that Bardella had sent antisemitic messages in 2013 “extremely serious and unacceptable” and urged him to clarify his position.
Responding to Macron on X, Bardella stated: “After October 7, 2023, I walked the streets of Paris and travelled to Israel. He did not.”
Earlier on Wednesday, during a two-day state visit to Spain, Macron said France would “never tolerate antisemitic statements”, calling the remarks allegedly made by Bardella “appalling and unacceptable” and adding that they required “the most extreme condemnation”. The French President urged those responsible to “provide clarifications”.
Contrary to Bardella’s claims, Macron did travel to Israel on 24 October 2023, in order to express France’s “solidarity” with Israel following Hamas’ October 7 attack.
Bardella — who French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has said will be her prime minister if she wins the country’s presidential election next spring — has vigorously denied authorship of comments about supposed Jewish banking monopolies and other antisemitic conspiracy theories, which were attributed to him in a piece published by investigative media outlet Mediapart on Monday.
Macron also criticised the National Rally’s “inflammatory language” directed at Mediapart, saying such rhetoric leads to escalation. He also deemed it “unacceptable to use violent language against political opponents” and “to target those who are, in part, organisers of this debate”, in an apparent reference to the media.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Bardella referred to “the beginnings of an all-out war, of attempts to destabilise the presidential campaign”.
He accused Mediapart of seeking “to kill his political career” and announced he would take legal action for defamation. Sitting by his side, Le Pen said she had “absolute confidence” in him.
According to Mediapart, the messages were written more than a decade ago. At the time, Bardella, now the president of the National Rally, was a teenager and a member of its predecessor, the National Front. The party was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Le Pen’s father, who repeatedly made Holocaust-denying remarks and was convicted several times for hate speech before his death in 2025.
The outlet said the comments it attributed to Bardella were drawn from private written exchanges but did not specify whether they were emails or another format. It said it had independently authenticated the exchanges but did not detail how, or say how it obtained them.
In 2023, Bardella was asked during an interview whether he believed that Jean-Marie Le Pen was an antisemite, to which he replied: “I do not search people’s hearts and minds, but I don’t believe it.”
Days after the interview, he walked back his comments, describing them as a “clumsy remark”, before declaring in May 2024 that the founder of the National Front had made statements which were “eminently antisemitic”.
In recent years, the National Rally has courted Jewish voters by positioning itself as a bulwark against Islamic extremism in France, as Le Pen has made huge efforts to dissociate herself from her father’s legacy. Researchers and critics of the party have dubbed this the “de-demonisation” of the party, after she expelled him from the National Front in 2015 and rebranded it in 2018.
Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli defended Bardella in a statement shared on X on Tuesday, describing the National Rally figure as “one of the clearest voices in Europe against Hamas” who “spoke in Jerusalem against antisemitism”, while denouncing France’s left as “experts at character assassination”, just like “leftists in Israel”.