Jordan Bardella, president of France's far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party, has flatly denied a series of antisemitic messages attributed to him in an investigation published Monday by French investigative outlet Mediapart. The messages, which Mediapart says it authenticated through months of research into private online conversations, date from the summer of 2013, when Bardella was 17 or 18 years old and a young activist within what was then called the Front National. Bardella called the accusations "flagrant falsehoods" and announced that his lawyer had filed a defamation complaint against the publication.

The alleged messages contain virulent antisemitic tropes, including the claim that "the Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them and steal from them" and references to a "New World Order dominated by Israel." Other excerpts reportedly target specific public figures, including then-Economy Minister Pierre Moscovici, whom the messages accuse of putting Israeli and banking interests above French ones. Bardella is also alleged to have expressed admiration for Alain Soral, an ideologue convicted multiple times for racial defamation and incitement to hatred, and for comedian Dieudonné, who had already been convicted for hate speech by that time. Mediapart also reports that the messages referenced antisemitic conspiracy theories linking banking to Zionism, naming institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Rothschild.

Bardella pushed back forcefully, writing on X that he "formally contests" the accusations and calling the documents "crude forgeries." He also questioned the timeline, noting that he was not yet an active party member in the summer of 2013 — a claim that sits awkwardly with his own previous statements that he joined the Front National in 2012. His political mentor and the RN's presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, dismissed the story as a "dirty trick" of the kind Mediapart specialises in, while admitting she had not read the article. She called it "so insane it can only be a fabrication."

The revelations land at a particularly sensitive moment for the RN, a party founded by Marine Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, alongside figures with documented links to Nazi collaboration and the far right. Marine Le Pen has spent more than a decade attempting to rebrand the party — changing its name from Front National to Rassemblement National and pursuing a strategy of so-called "de-demonisation." Bardella, 31, has been a central figure in that effort, becoming in March 2025 the first RN leader officially invited by the Israeli government to attend a conference in Jerusalem on fighting antisemitism. Yonathan Arfi, president of the CRIF, the representative body of French Jewish institutions, said the alleged messages were "an illustration of the limits of the RN's de-demonisation," adding that "the DNA of the RN, a refuge for identitarians and conspiracy theorists, has not fundamentally changed."

The timing is consequential for French politics more broadly. Polls published this week show Le Pen better placed than ever to win the 2027 presidential election, and she has been positioning Bardella as her prospective prime minister. Opponents were swift to respond: the head of the Socialist Party pointedly recalled Bardella's 2023 claim that Jean-Marie Le Pen — who was convicted of antisemitism on multiple occasions — was not an antisemite. France's minister for equality and anti-discrimination described the alleged messages as "extremely serious, if true." Bardella himself framed the affair as a political operation aimed at derailing the RN's campaign, saying that "everything will be done to destabilise" it and destroy him politically.