The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen and party chief Jordan Bardella wore broad smiles as they pitched their “ticket” to voters with a view to taking power in 2027 — with her as president and him as prime minister. 

Using the original English word, the official unveiling of their duo in January was a new move in the context of French politics, where the president is elected directly and the post holds powerful institutional functions. Prime ministers are named afterwards to run the government and often sacrificed when presidents need to reboot in a crisis.

The announcement in a joint interview underlined how Le Pen had anointed the 28-year-old Bardella as the face of the new, professionalised Rassemblement National (RN) that she had spent more than a decade building. She was betting that her chances of succeeding her longtime rival, the centrist President Emmanuel Macron, were stronger with Bardella at her side. 

Le Pen last week told the Financial Times that she came up with the “ticket” as part of a strategy to prepare the French public to choose the RN. “The more people know us and the more they know precisely what we will do, the more they will be able to turn their backs on the caricatures and fears about us that are stirred up by our adversaries,” she said. 

But now the strength of the bond between Le Pen, aged 55, and her much younger lieutenant could be tested in the political turmoil touched off by Macron’s decision to call snap elections for the National Assembly. The president made the shock move after his centrist alliance was trounced in this month’s European elections where the RN list led by Bardella won 31 per cent of the vote to his 15 per cent. 

In the first leg of the two-round legislative election on Sunday, the anti-immigration, populist RN appeared ascendant once again, setting up the possibility that Bardella could be propelled to the premiership in a matter of weeks. Projections from the pollster Ipsos placed the RN on 34 per cent, putting it on track to win the most seats in parliament and potentially even an outright majority in the final round of voting on July 7.  

The RN has proved adept at appealing to people worried about the cost of living amid inflation, and has tapped into discontent about declining public services while exploiting anger at a lofty president Macron.

Despite the duo’s polished sales pitch, Le Pen and Bardella still have a radical agenda that would roil French society. It includes policies such as slashing immigration, ending birthright citizenship and creating a “national preference” for French citizens on social housing and welfare programmes.

In the Elysée palace, officials have long suggested in private that the pair will turn on each other in a quest for power. They seized on recent polling showing the protégé Bardella had eclipsed the mentor Le Pen in popularity and that more people would greet his accession to the presidency favourably than hers. 

Asked if he could push aside Le Pen to run himself in 2027, Bardella told the FT: “No, no, no. I do not have that ambition.” He has a large portrait of himself and Le Pen hanging in his office and still uses the formal vous to address her, although she has told him he does not have to.

Le Pen added: “The idea that I would be upset that he is more popular in polls than me, on the contrary, I’m delighted . . . I will need a popular prime minister to govern France.” 

In 2011, Le Pen officially took over the movement her father Jean-Marie helped create almost 40 years earlier. But before that, she had come to believe that the party needed to distance itself from the baggage of its founders, including her father and the journalist Pierre Bousquet, who was in the French division of the Waffen-SS during the second world war. 

With historical roots in fascism, the Front National (FN), as the party was originally called, remained on the fringes of French politics because of Jean-Marie. He was convicted in 1990 of hate speech for once likening the Nazi gas chambers to a “detail of history”.

France at the time was still reckoning with the historical legacy of Vichy collaboration with Nazi Germany, making the FN radioactive for most voters. At the age of eight, when Le Pen was growing up as the youngest of three daughters in Paris, a large bomb targeting her father destroyed the family home. No one was hurt, and the crime never solved.

After training as a lawyer, Le Pen practised for around six years before entering the family business: politics. In 2002, Jean-Marie surprisingly made the presidential run off, setting off mass anti-FN protests which led in turn to a crushing victory for the incumbent, Jacques Chirac.

It was then that the daughter set out to change things, according to Louis Aliot, the mayor of Perpignan, who broke with Jean-Marie to side with his daughter, with whom he was formerly in a relationship. “We were both from a younger generation, so we’re not obsessed with the past,” he said. “After the protests against us, we decided that we had to change the FN from the inside.” 

The project to “detoxify” the party became Le Pen’s mission. She changed its name in 2018, a classic marketing strategy to make voters forget the past. She had already ousted her father from the party in 2015, and expunged other radical elements, although critics say traces of its antisemitic, racist past remain. Gradually she shifted the RN’s platform to emphasise cost of living issues and play off the supposed contempt that Parisian elites have for rural areas. 

In Macron, Le Pen had her perfect opponent — a former banker, a product of top French educational institutions and a technocrat who wanted to liberalise the economy and boost the EU.

But in the 2017 presidential election, she lost to him by a wide margin, wounded by a weak debate performance. That defeat propelled her and the RN leadership into a bout of soul-searching. She and her closest cadres sought to rebuild both by boosting her policy expertise on issues from defence to the economy, and training up a new crop of politicians formed at the local level. They came to be known as “generation Marine”. 

Among them was Bardella, who says he first saw Le Pen on stage at a rally when he was 16 years old. She so impressed him that he joined her party the next day, going on to promote it in his hometown of Saint-Denis, a working-class and immigrant area north of Paris where he lived with his mother.

In 2015, he created a group in Saint-Denis called “Banlieues Patriotes” that sought to woo residents of the diverse and disaffected neighbourhoods on the Paris periphery. According to French media, he once handed out flyers that said “Muslims, maybe, but French first”.

His activities put him on Le Pen’s radar. They met at a gathering of young RN activists convened by the party leader at a pizzeria in Nanterre after a local election. She sat next to him and by the end of lunch had asked him to work on her 2017 campaign. “I was a bit intimidated by her given my young age,” he said, but agreed to the job. 

“He seemed a disciplined and articulate young man, who I found very French, with the way he dressed and an elegance,” Le Pen said.  

Le Pen and her team helped craft a narrative around Bardella, emphasising his childhood in social housing with a divorced mother who struggled to make ends meet. He has said his views were shaped by seeing the ravages of drug dealing and crime in his local area and riots that erupted in 2005 after two adolescents died during a police chase.

The actual story was slightly different. Bardella’s father was a small-business owner who sent him to private Catholic schools and gave him a more bourgeois upbringing, according to a biography by Pierre-Stéphane Fort. He did not complete his studies in geography at university and has not held a private-sector job.

Pascal Humeau, a media trainer who worked with Bardella for four years, said the politician was a “pure product of marketing” who followed Le Pen’s line. Humeau helped him adopt a more confident speaking style and start every media appearance with direct eye contact and a strong bonjour. “Who is Jordan Bardella really? We don’t know,” he said.

When Le Pen passed over more senior cadres to put the then 23-year-old at the top of the RN list for European elections in 2019, some warned her it was too risky. He came in first, one point ahead of Macron’s list. 

With Bardella, the RN has won parts of the electorate previously wary of Le Pen, including women, white-collar workers with diplomas and the business community. The biggest influencer in French politics, he has a large TikTok following that has helped attract young voters. He has also focused more on identity politics than Le Pen, declaring recently that there was a “cultural battle” to be fought against Islamism in France.

Will the “ticket” prevail or will it unravel as opponents predict?

“The ticket is very solid,” Bardella told the FT wryly. “It is printed on thick paper that will not tear.” 

leila.abboud@ft.com

Additional reporting by Adrienne Klasa

Grief and anger engulfed the city of Utica, N.Y. after a police officer shot and killed Nyah Mway, a 13-year-old boy, on Friday night.

The Utica Police Department said the fatal shooting occurred amid a foot chase between Mway and three officers. The officers saw what they believed to be a handgun on Mway, according to a statement released by the department on Facebook. Mway, who graduated from middle school just two days earlier, was then tackled to the ground before an officer, later identified by police as Patrick Husnay, discharged his firearm. The weapon on Mway was later determined to be a pellet gun.

Efforts to contact relatives of Mway were unsuccessful, but on a GoFundMe page set up by his family he was remembered as “an outgoing kid who loved to be outside biking and playing.” The family said he was “a good kid” who “has never gotten in trouble with law enforcement before.”

Mway and his family came to the U.S. from Myanmar, also known as Burma, as Karen refugees over eight years ago, according to the GoFundMe page. Over the years, thousands of Karen refugees have settled in Utica to flee ethnic and religious persecution by the Myanmar government.

How the shooting unfolded

On Friday night, police officers patrolled the streets of West Utica to investigate a string of armed robberies in the area. The suspects were described as Asian males who carried a black firearm, police said.

Around 10 p.m., three officers stopped Mway and another 13-year-old boy outside on a street, believing the two boys fit the description of the robbery suspects, police said.

In body-camera footage released by law-enforcement, an officer asks to pat down Mway in search of a possible weapon, and Mway tries to run away. The officers followed.

In a statement, the police said the officers believed Mway was holding and pointing a firearm at the officers. In the body-camera footage, an officer yelled out “Gun!” and tackled Mway to the ground. Soon, all three officers appeared hovering over Mway. Roughly 15 seconds after the chase began, a shot was fired by police.

Screams from onlookers followed. One officer attempted to do chest compressions on Mway. He was later transported to Wynn Hospital where he died from his wounds.

Police said they recovered a replica of a Glock 17 Gen5 handgun with a detachable magazine on scene. It was later determined to be a pellet gun.

Police officers are put on administrative leave with pay

Utica Police identified the officers involved as Husnay, a six-year veteran of the Utica Police Department; Bryce Patterson, a four-year veteran; and Andrew Citriniti, who has been on the force for two-and-a-half years.

Police Chief Mark Williams said all three officers were put on administrative leave with pay.

Utica Police said an internal investigation has been launched. The New York State’s Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigations will also investigate if the shooting violated any state laws.

On Saturday, the Utica police department said in a statement, “Our thoughts are with our officers involved, and the family of the deceased juvenile.”

In a later statement on Saturday night, the department added, “It is our sincerest desire that at the conclusion of these investigations an impartial, fair, and thorough investigation will have been completed, giving answers to any remaining lingering questions.”

Response from the community

At a news conference on Saturday, Utica mayor Michael P. Galime said transparency will be a priority.

“What happened yesterday evening in our community is an event that has become all too familiar and routine, over and over and over again,” he said.

Troves of family, friends and community members attended the conference, expressing their anger, grief and disbelief to the situation.

On Saturday, hundreds also gathered for a vigil in honor of Mway, bringing flowers, balloons and candles.

“We won’t be satisfied until the murderers are put in jail,” said Mway’s older brother, The Daily Sentinel reported.

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Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and the poll-topping far-right parties of Austria and the Czech Republic have announced plans to form a new faction in the European parliament, pledging to end support for Ukraine and push for peace talks with Russia.

“Historians will decide in a few years’ time how important this day was — we think this is the day when European policy begins to change,” Orbán said on Sunday at a press conference in Vienna.

“The Brussels elite is resisting. They do not accept the decision of the European [voters]. They don’t want change, they want to hold on to the status quo. That is unacceptable. That is why this current joint group and platform is being created,” he said.

The announcement comes as negotiations to form political blocs enter their final days following European parliament elections in June in which far-right parties made gains across the continent.

The Patriots for Europe, as the proposed new alliance has dubbed itself, will need to sign up MEPs from at least four other EU member states by Thursday to become an official faction, unlocking additional funding, bargaining power and parliamentary leadership roles.

Its founding parties — Austria’s Freedom party (FPÖ), the Czech Republic’s ANO, which recently dropped out of the liberal Renew group, and Hungary’s Fidesz — already have 26 MEPs between them. A group needs at least 23 lawmakers from seven countries to be able to form.

“From this starting signal, all political forces who wish to do so and who want to join in our political and positive reform efforts are very welcome. And from what I have heard in the last few days, there will be more of them,” said FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl. 

FPÖ — which doubled its EU parliamentary seats and is on course to win the Austrian national election in September — is the organising force behind the alliance, which Kickl said was a “carrier rocket” for radical change in Brussels. 

The announcement marks a formal break between the FPÖ and France’s Rassemblement National, led by Marine Le Pen, in Europe. In the previous parliament the two sat in the Identity and Democracy (ID) group.

The RN is expected to emerge as France’s leading party in the first round of voting on Sunday in the country’s election. In Europe, the RN’s efforts to moderate its views in order to secure votes at home have slowly opened a rift with more hardline parties, however.

Le Pen forced the expulsion of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party from ID after its lead election candidate said not all Nazi SS soldiers were criminals. The exclusion was opposed by FPÖ.

Attitudes towards Russia have emerged as a crucial dividing line on the right, with ultraconservative parties such as Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy staunchly opposed to any rapprochement with Moscow over Ukraine.

However, the PiS party has not ruled out joining the new group. “We are observing developments,” said an official.

“We will not stand idly by and watch a European superstate develop in which the parliaments of the member states are reduced to a kind of folklore department,” said Kickl, calling for a more forthright agenda against Europe’s “radical centrism”. His opening remarks also contained numerous reference to “peace” with Russia.

The FPÖ has a long history of close relations with President Vladimir Putin, and has been harshly critical of Ukraine since Russia began its full-scale invasion of its neighbour in 2022. 

Alongside Orbán and Kickl, ANO’s Andrej Babiš signed a “patriotic manifesto” that they have sent to other far-right parties in Europe as the founding text of the proposed new faction.

“We are here together because we are united by three main priorities that will define our policies in the EU. The defence of sovereignty, the fight against illegal migration and the revision of the Green Deal [plan to combat climate change],” said Babis. 

One powerful potential member would be Germany’s AfD, which has 14 MEPs.

But Hungary’s Fidesz is opposed to teaming up with the German party, according to an AfD official. Leader Alice Weidel told the Financial Times she would keep her options open and not join a group just for the sake of joining.

Despite their increase in the number of seats, far-right parties do not seem on track to wield more power in the EU assembly as they are splintering into more groups than in the former parliament. Simon Hix, professor of politics at the European University Institute, said this development would increase the likelihood that the largest group, the centre-right European People’s party, will pivot to towards the centre and centre-left.

“We’re heading for the most fragmented parliament we’ve ever had. But the fragmentation on the far right will strengthen the centrist coalition, as the EPP will have nowhere else to go.”