Jordan Bardella, a confident 27-year-old, saw his status as the far-right’s rising star confirmed Saturday after party members elected him to succeed veteran leader Marine Le Pen as leader of the National Rally.

The Paris-born politician was the clear favorite to take over the party after Le Pen decided to step down from the role after 11 years at the helm.

The party, formerly known as Front National, had previously been run by Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, for 40 years.

Bardella is now the first party leader outside the family dynasty in half a century.

“The fact that the party leader will not bear the Le Pen name is a sign of Marine’s openness and trust in the new generation,” Bardella told AFP during a recent trip to eastern France.

Not that the ultra-loyal protégé, elected to the European Parliament in 2019, plans to eclipse her.

“I am a continuity candidate with the goal of building on the incredible legacy that Marine is passing,” he added.

He expects and wants Le Pen to run for the fourth time as presidential candidate in 2027, after she garnered a record 41.5 percent in April’s runoff against President Emmanuel Macron.

She then led the party’s general election campaign in June, in which the RN won 89 seats, a tenfold increase, making it the largest opposition party in the National Assembly of the House of Commons.

His only opponent was Louis Aliot, the mayor of the southwestern city of Perpignan, who, despite having been a party member for more than 30 years, has failed to match Bardella’s public profile.

Le Pen’s 32-year-old niece Marion Marechal, long thought to be a possible family heir, is out of the picture after she left the party ahead of the presidential election to support rival far-right candidate Eric Zemmour.

Bardella had been acting president since September 2021, when Le Pen resigned during her presidential campaign.

“He did everything right and is respected by everyone,” right-wing member of the Bundestag Laurent Jacobelli told the AFP news agency during an election campaign stop in mid-October in Hayange on the Moselle.

“And he knows how to get different people to work together, so why would we change anything?”

At the event, Bardella spoke confidently and without notes on stage for 40 minutes, recounting details about his childhood on the eighth floor of a drab high-rise building in the crime-ridden Seine-Saint-Denis district, northeast of Paris.

He lived with his mother, an Italian immigrant and single mother.

“Every day I saw from my window and when I entered the building that drug dealers checked if you were from the police,” he said.

There was also an Islamic school across the street, he said.

“I used to see groups of girls aged five, six or seven walking away with veils over their heads,” he added.

Personal harassment and civil unrest in 2005, led by mainly black and North African youth angry at police violence, prompted him to join Le Pen’s party at the age of just 16.

“I got into politics very early on because I didn’t want all of France to look like what I experienced,” he told the crowd.

Bardella likes to emphasize that he belongs to a new generation of nationalists who have little in common with the racist, anti-Semitic brawl surrounding Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Front National.

Marine Le Pen has gone to great lengths to distance herself from this toxic legacy, though critics say racism remains rife at the grassroots and accuse Le Pen of simply spinning old ideas with new language.

Bardella is the very image of the clean and controlled modern party she now promotes: strikingly groomed, always in immaculate shirts, polished shoes, with close-cropped hair.

“Without Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Front National would not exist, but without the Marine, it would no longer exist,” Bardella told AFP.

“She turned it from a culture of protest to a culture of government.”

Opponents within the party, including Aliot, have expressed unease at an alleged willingness to adopt ideas espoused by Le Pen’s far-right rival, pundit Eric Zemmour.

Last year, Bardella came close to embracing Zemmour’s mantra of the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory that suggests white Europeans are being deliberately replaced by immigrants.

He also hastily backed away from a plan to take part in a demonstration organized by Zemmour’s party after the killing of a 12-year-old by an Algerian woman, who was threatened with expulsion, shocked France.

There are also questions about the value of the RN presidency for Bardella, as Le Pen officially leads his cohort in Parliament and is widely expected to be his presidential nominee in 2027.

But many expect the party’s position to be a stepping stone.

“Eventually Marine will step aside and he has every chance,” said Alice Orsudci, a 52-year-old business owner who follows his campaign tour.

“I don’t know if we’re allowed to say that and I don’t want to flatter him, but I have a strong belief that one day Jordan will be president,” said MP Jacobelli.