Mediapart publishes new evidence linking Jordan Bardella to antisemitic Messenger messages

New evidence from Mediapart

On Friday 9 October, Mediapart published a new article claiming to have established a direct link, dating from September 2013, between the official Twitter account of Jordan Bardella, president of the Rassemblement national (RN), and a Messenger conversation in which antisemitic ideas were written. The site says the link is clearest on 12 September 2013, the eve of Bardella's 18th birthday, when he was 17. That day, according to Mediapart, Bardella wrote in the Messenger conversation that Hollande's economic adviser worked for the Rothschild bank. Two minutes earlier, at 22:50, his public Twitter account had posted the same information. Franceinfo also found Twitter posts echoing references from the sphere of Alain Soral, who has been convicted several times for antisemitism, and Bardella's entourage denies any closeness to him.

Bardella's denial on LCI

On Thursday 8 October, Bardella was a guest on LCI, where he spent the first half hour of the programme setting out an argument he has refined since Mediapart's first revelations. He described the affair as one that everyone mocks, and said it was crowding out the presidential campaign. He rejected the accusations outright.

I have never made these vile remarks.

Bardella also refused to plead youthful error for positions that he said were not his, and said he had never met Alain Soral. He presented his own character as the answer to the accusations.

I am a reasonable boy, I think the French know me, I have no particular taste for sulphurous things or for extremism.

Bardella has filed a complaint for defamation and is preparing another for forgery and use of forgery against Mediapart. The remarks are said to have been made in private conversations between 2013 and 2015, a span that the reporting places across those years rather than on a single date.

A destabilisation operation

Bardella presents himself as the target of a destabilisation operation and said it did not come from within his ranks, though he excluded nothing from outside the party. He accused Mediapart and its journalists of seeking to assassinate him politically. He said that people could judge the timing and methods of the revelations for themselves. He also argued that the whole affair was built to stir up controversies that nobody cares about.

Time will no doubt reveal the truth.

The accusations have now been running for ten days, according to the reporting, and Bardella's denials have not ended the debate in the campaign.

What the poll shows

An Ifop poll for LCI, conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday among a representative sample of 1,000 people of voting age, found that 21% of respondents now see Bardella's image as deteriorated because of the accusations. Three quarters of respondents (74%) judge the accusations serious, and 61% say his denials have not convinced them. The survey was carried out in the days before the LCI programme aired, so it predates his televised defence.