European construction began like certain medieval cathedrals, built not just with stone, but with the conviction that the future could be more solid than the past. Jean Monnet said that Europe would emerge from crises and would be the sum of the solutions found. Robert Schuman remembered that nothing would be possible without men of good will. Konrad Adenauer insisted that peace was always a fragile but indispensable building.
None of them imagined, however, that in the 21st century the biggest political tremors shaking the continent would come simultaneously from Moscow and Washington. The Russian aggression against Ukraine and the return of an unpredictable America, which looks at Europe not as a strategic partner but as an ideological enemy, created seismic waves that cross institutions, economies and consciences. Perhaps they did not foresee something else: that these external shocks would find an internal point of resonance in Paris. That the epicenter of the tensions that question the European project could move within Europe itself, transforming France not into the engine of integration, but into its decisive battlefield.
Today, at the doorstep of the 2027 presidential elections, it is impossible to ignore that the European project faces an internal test of an existential nature. And this test has a name: Jordan Bardella.
France, the traditional political engine of European integration, is experiencing one of those phases of historical disorientation that so fascinated Raymond Aron. The succession of government crises, corruption, the arrest of a former President, the serial dismissal of Prime Ministers and the wear and tear of Emmanuel Macron created a void that was just waiting for someone capable of filling it with energy and ideological simplicity. Odoxa polls place Bardella, 30 years old, president of the National Regrouping, at the forefront in a country that no longer believes in its own ruling elite. What is happening in France is no longer just an electoral cycle: it is a change of era, of paradigm and, definitely, of direction.
Its rise is not just the result of disenchantment. It is the result of a political, media and emotional ecosystem that has changed rapidly. Bardella understood what a large part of the political class has not yet understood: in tired democracies, it is symbols that win elections, not programs. That’s why he invested in a global digital accelerator, transforming TikTok into the postmodern equivalent of old public squares. The French press describes the way he speaks “in the grammar of youth”: short videos, sharp sentences, calibrated indignation, immaculate aesthetics. Like Zohran Mamdani in New York, he attracts Gen Z with his intensity and promise of disruption, even when that disruption means a serious setback.
The French paradox is that Bardella simultaneously embodies stylistic novelty and structural continuity. It is new in age and form, but old in political content. It recovers the classic themes of the French extreme right: immigration, borders, crime, identity, Europe. It proposes a referendum to restrict the right to land, severe limitations on access to social support for those who do not have an “irreproachable” past and the reintroduction of military service as a way of disciplining and training new nationalists. In criminal policy, it promises absolute toughness, an end to automatic sentence reductions, the reinstallation of an “order” that is confused with punishment. In the interview with the Telegraph, he repeats his ambition to make France the least attractive country for immigration in Europe and defends the review of border agreements with the United Kingdom to allow vessels to be returned to French waters, in line with British rhetoric of “stop the boats”.
It is when one observes his vision of Europe that the French earthquake takes on a continental dimension. Bardella is not just a French nationalist; is the face of a post-Europe project. The RN no longer openly defends leaving the European Union or the euro, after realizing the electoral cost of this agenda in the 2017 presidential elections. Today it talks about “changing Europe from within”. But when you go from slogan to substance, what you find is an agenda of patient dismantling of the community building: absolute primacy of national law over European law, drastic limitation of Brussels’ powers, reversal of common policies in areas such as migration, climate, agriculture and/or trade.
In several recent interventions, Bardella insists that France must “free itself from European demands” and “recover essential sovereignties”. Behind the formula is the idea of a Europe reduced to a market, without political ambition or autonomous capacity for strategic decision-making. A Europe that is useful as a source of funds and a legal framework when appropriate, but disposable whenever it dares to limit national voluntarism. It is not an explicit ‘Frexit’ proposal, but it is a strategy of continuous erosion that, in practice, pushes the EU towards a fragile confederation of crossed vetoes. The choice, in fact, of economic advisors from the openly Leave movement, such as Charles-Henri Gallois, shows that the border between the official line and pure and hard sovereignism is, to say the least, tenuous.
The relationship with Russia illustrates the same pattern of ambiguity. The loan of 9.4 million euros granted in 2014 by a Russian bank to the then National Front (former name of the RN), later restructured and finally paid in 2023, left a trail of suspicions about the proximity between Marine Le Pen’s party and Vladimir Putin’s circle of power. The RN insists that everything was limited to a relationship between political formation and banking institution, but journalistic investigations showed direct political contacts, and the line followed by the party in European votes on sanctions and military support for Kiev reveals a consistent pattern of prudence in relation to Moscow and resistance to robust support measures for Ukraine.
Bardella learned the strategic lesson of 2022: today he declares support for Ukraine’s right to defend itself and states that he will respect France’s NATO commitments. But he always does so with a footnote: he would be against sending long-range missiles to reach Russian territory, he would place limits on new sanctions that “harm the French economy” and he fears, above all, “escalation”. In practice, his position is close to Donald Trump’s line: selective support for Ukraine, hostility to any deepening of European integration in defense matters and a clear preference for a weak, dependent and divided Europe.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Bardella cultivates political and symbolic relationships with Nigel Farage, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and illiberal governments such as those of Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico. He sees in Giorgia Meloni a model of normalization of the extreme right in power: national-conservative discourse, minimum Atlantic respectability, migratory firmness, economic acceptability in the markets. The difference is that, unlike Meloni, who subscribes to a logic of negotiation with Brussels, Bardella plays mainly on the logic of confrontation. His project is to transform France into the permanent veto bloc of European integration.
All this would be less dangerous if it were just a French curiosity. But the truth is that Bardella is also the product of a Europe that failed too much. A Europe that promised prosperity and delivered stagnation. That guaranteed order and allowed disorder. That announced a common future, but never clearly explained the price of that future. The cost of living crisis, fiscal malaise, increasing inequalities and the feeling that the political center no longer represents anyone have created the perfect conditions for the simplistic discourse of the new populists. Including in France, where the Government is preparing a significant increase in land taxes that will affect millions of landowners and further fuel the populist narrative against the central State.
The risk Europe faces is not just that of one man, but that of a wrong diagnosis. Bardella prospers because many French people no longer believe that Europe has answers to the problems of their time. And because no European leader has managed, in recent years, to portray integration as a project capable of protecting and transforming lives. In the absence of narrative, emotion wins. In the absence of trust, fear wins.
If Europe wants to regain public opinion, it will have to do what it has stopped doing for a long time: tell the truth, take risks, rebuild trust. It will have to show that integration is not fragility, but shared sovereignty. That identity and openness are not incompatible. That European defense is not a federalist dream, but a strategic necessity in a disordered world and changing political axes. Above all, it will have to recover that original spirit of Monnet and Schuman that saw politics as the art of uniting and not separating.
The 2027 French elections are more than a national choice. They are a historical crossroads. Either Europe will find its vocation again or it will allow it to be taken away from it. And, as always happens with great human constructions, the ruin begins when we forget the reason we built them.