Bardella's "whitewashing" project hits a snag: Account deletion timing exposed, pressure builds on France's far-right course

According to a Friday report by the French satirical and investigative weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, Jordan Bardella, a core figure of the far-right National Rally (RN), immediately deleted all data from a Facebook account he had used during his early years as an activist for the National Front (FN, the predecessor of the National Rally) after allegations regarding his early anti-Semitic writings were disclosed. The deletion occurred between September 28 and October 2, shortly after Mediapart first published the relevant allegations.

Le Canard Enchaîné said it obtained "excerpts from private conversations" and on that basis determined that the account data within the aforementioned time window had been "entirely deleted." The disclosure of the timing has placed Bardella's defense on the back foot — just days earlier, he had publicly claimed that he "did not have a Facebook account" and had "not used" the social media platform "for a long time."

The allegations originate from an investigative report by Mediapart. The report cited chat records purportedly written by Bardella in 2013, which read: "Jews must rule over other peoples, crush them, and plunder them; Zionists must necessarily be Jewish, and essentially so." Mediapart subsequently published screenshots images of messages purportedly sent by Bardella on Facebook Messenger. Whether the above chat records were actually written by Bardella himself remains disputed, and the complete chain of origin and chain of evidence regarding the "excerpts from private conversations" has not been made public.

The Bardella camp denied all allegations. His team told the media that he "never logged into any facebook account and did not delete any messages," and said a defamation lawsuit would be filed "in the coming hours." Bardella himself adopted a full-throated counterattack strategy, publicly accusing opponents of waging "total war" in an attempt to block the National Rally's bid for the presidency, and vow to take Mediapart to court, accusing it of publishing fabricated content.

The pressure has not eased as a result. Mediapart further disclosed on Friday that it had found similarities between posts published on Bardella's personal Facebook account and messages posted by the National Rally's official X account, further undermining his self-exculpation that he "never used Facebook."

On the political maneuvering front, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen told the media that she has "complete trust" in Bardella. Bardella is widely seen as a possible prime ministerial pick should Le Pen win next year's presidential election.

Bardella is precisely the key executor of Le Pen's "de-demonization" strategy. The project is intended to shed the historical baggage of overt anti-Semitism left by her father, the party's founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. In 2025, Bardella visited Israel, becoming the first French far-right leader to do so, an act seen as the symbolic gesture of this image makeover. Whether the Bardella camp will actually file a defamation lawsuit and how the legal proceedings will progress remains to be seen, but the question of whether his "de-demonization" narrative can withstand independent investigation and courtroom scrutiny has already pushed the party deeper into the eye of the political polarization storm.