Marine Le Pen's National Rally and its ally UDR won 15 seats in France's indirectly elected Senate on Sunday, clearing the 10-seat threshold to form its first parliamentary group in the upper house. Days later, the investigative site Mediapart (a French independent news outlet) published private messages from 2013–2015 attributed to party president Jordan Bardella, then a teenage National Front activist, containing antisemitic and conspiratorial remarks; Bardella calls them forgeries and plans a defamation suit, while Mediapart stands by its reporting. The row, seven months before the April presidential election, threatens the party's years-long effort to shed its extremist image just as polls show Le Pen leading.