“For the first time, they are perfectly even” in polls, said Frédéric Dabi, director general at polling firm IFOP. Le Pen and Bardella both attained 31 percent of voting intentions for the first round of the presidential election in a survey published this week — even if such figures must be taken with a large grain of salt two years before the actual contest.
The fact that voters are seemingly fine with swapping Le Pen for Bardella is bound to ruffle feathers in the National Rally, given the party’s history under Le Pen’s iron-fisted father, Jean-Marie, and the internecine battle for succession. Le Pen had carefully assigned roles around her, including Bardella’s, partly to avoid the kinds of rivalries that tore the party apart under her father’s reign.
Questions have been raised as to whether Bardella is ready for the spotlight that accompanies a presidential campaign.
Bardella had been poised to run in the subordinate spot on an American-style ticket with Marine Le Pen, as her future prime minister (in France, the president appoints a prime minister after being elected). But his mentor’s legal troubles mean her Elysée dreams now rest on whether an appeals court rules in her favor next summer.
And so Bardella finds himself propelled to the more prominent — and slightly uncomfortable — role of promising understudy tapped to replace a star not yet ready to step aside.
Le Pen camp on edge
Worryingly for Le Pen, “there are clearly some doubts among her current and potential voters about her being on the starting line in 2027,” Dabi said. In an IFOP survey published May 12, only 53 percent of respondents thought she would be in a position to run, against 69 percent for Bardella.