At just 29, Jordan Bardella inherits the French far-right spotlight, whether he’s ready or not

PARIS (AP) — He wears his suits like armor, smiles like a pop star and boasts more than 2 million followers on TikTok. At just 29, Jordan Bardella has become the fresh-faced figurehead of France’s National Rally party and is now poised to inherit one of the most electorally successful far-right machines in Europe.

But behind the image of youthful confidence lies a question increasingly whispered by allies and adversaries alike: Can Bardella, who has no experience in government, really lead?

The presidential ambitions of Bardella's mentor, Marine Le Pen, could be over after a French court convicted her of embezzling European Union funds and barred her from holding office for five years. That means Bardella finds himself the last man standing atop the largest party in the French National Assembly. But having the spotlight doesn’t mean he commands the stage.

Critics call him Le Pen’s puppet. Le Pen calls him her asset.

On Monday night, she seemed to suggest the moment of reckoning might be approaching sooner than expected.

“I hope we won’t have to use that asset sooner than necessary,” she told the TF1 television network.

Bardella was born in 1995 in the gritty suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis — a place more often in headlines for gang violence and poverty than political promise. He grew up in public housing, the son of Italian and Algerian heritage. His father ran a vending machine business. His family scraped together enough to send him to a semi-private Catholic school. He never finished university.

But ambition moved faster than education. At 17, he joined the National Rally — then still known as the National Front, a party shunned by polite society and defined by the legacy of Jean-Marie Le Pen. For most, it was a dead end. For Bardella, it was a launchpad.

By 23, he was a member of the European Parliament. By 26, Marine Le Pen had made him party president — the first person outside the Le Pen family to lead the far-right movement in its half-century history. It was a symbolic handover, but also a calculated move to modernize a brand long stained by racism and antisemitism.

“Jordan Bardella is the creation of Marine Le Pen,” said Cécile Alduy, a Stanford University professor and expert on the French far right. “He has been made by her and is extremely loyal.”

He quickly became the party’s face: camera-ready, uncontroversial and fluent in the aesthetics of modern politics. While Le Pen kept hold of the ideological reins, Bardella toured the country as the youthful ambassador of a rebranded movement.

Their alliance was once pitched as a kind of American-style ticket — she for president, he for prime minister. But that balance no longer holds. With Le Pen sidelined, Bardella is no longer the backup.

The problem is, he was never meant to lead.

Bardella has never held national office. He’s never run a ministry. But he has built a following. With an outsized social media presence and a slick, stage-managed image, he has become a star among young voters, offering a set of politics that looks fresh, even when the message is familiar.

His content is clean, curated and relentlessly on message. Campaign videos feature sharp suits, barbed quips at President Emmanuel Macron and selfie lines at rally stops. He doesn’t improvise. He doesn’t deviate.

That discipline has helped broaden the National Rally’s appeal, especially in the aftermath of Macron’s defeat in the 2024 European elections. Bardella was the one who demanded Macron dissolve Parliament. When Macron agreed, Bardella’s status shifted from party mascot to potential prime minister.

Yet the more visible he becomes, the more his limitations show.

Last week, Bardella traveled to Israel in a bid to bolster his image on the world stage. It backfired. Major Jewish organizations boycotted the event he attended. Israeli President Isaac Herzog stayed away. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered only a brief, formal handshake.

The French press called the visit a reputational flop — a trip meant to signal international stature that ended up highlighting its absence. Bardella may wear the suit, but many say he hasn’t yet grown into it.

At home, his platform is standard fare for the far right: stricter immigration laws, fewer social benefits for noncitizens and limits on dual nationals holding sensitive public jobs. He’s pledged lower energy taxes, a reversal of Macron’s pension reform and a ban on mobile phones in high schools.

Abroad, he’s attempted to sound more statesmanlike, voicing support for arming Ukraine, labeling Russia a “multidimensional threat” and calling for France to eventually exit NATO’s integrated command, though not while war rages in Europe.

It’s a program designed to reassure nervous voters while keeping the movement’s nationalist core intact.

“He has a clean slate and comes with no baggage of the past,” Alduy said.

But the real question isn’t about his past. It’s whether he’s ready for what comes next.

For now, Bardella walks a fine line as the protégé who was suddenly promoted, the frontman who's trying to become the act.

His strength lies in presentation. The suit, the smile, the soundbites — they’re all in place. His weakness is what lies behind that performance. That’s still in question.

The French press has criticized Bardella for failing to prepare his party for real power. National Rally figures have said his leadership has focused more on personal promotion than on collective progress, more about boosting his own image than caring about the party or building a serious governing force.

Others have linked him to a lack of structure and professionalism inside the party. Projects he once promised — from recruiting outside talent to strengthening local networks — have stalled. Key voices say the party is too centralized, too top-down and too afraid to challenge its young leader.

Whether Bardella becomes the future of French politics or just its most polished understudy will depend not on Marine Le Pen but on whether he can become more than her invention.

FILE - Jordan Bardella, lead candidate of the French far right National Rally for the upcoming European elections, speaks during a meeting on June 2, 2024, in Paris. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla, File)

FILE - Acting president of the far-right National Rally party Jordan Bardella arrives at a TV studio, April 20, 2022, in La Plaine-Saint-Denis, outside of Paris. (AP Photo/Francois Mori, File)

FILE - Leader of France's National Rally (RN) Jordan Bardella, center, listens to Israeli officer Ethan Dana during a visit to a memorial for victims and hostages of the 2023 Hamas attacks, near kibbutz Re'im in southern Israel, Wednesday, March 26, 2025. (Jack Guez/Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - Leader of the French far-right National Rally Marine Le Pen, left, and Jordan Bardella, lead candidate of the party for the upcoming European election, right, are seen during a political meeting on June 2, 2024, in Paris. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla, File)

FILE - French Far-right party National Rally president Jordan Bardella delivers a speech at a meeting in Marseille, southern France, Sunday, March 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole, File)

FILE - French far-right National Rally party leader Marine Le Pen, center, and President Jordan Bardella salute supporters at a meeting in Marseille, southern France, March 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole, File)

FILE - Jordan Bardella, lead candidate of the French far right National Rally for the upcoming European elections, poses before a debate at the French state owned TV channel France 2 in Aubervilliers, near Paris, on June 4, 2024. (Stephane de Sakutin, Pool via AP, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)