Do we like them?

Do we like Jordan Bardella?

Our score: 2 out of 10. He has voted against EU climate laws and most of the migration pact, and we found no verified good works to set against that.

Born in 1995 in the Paris suburbs, Bardella had a childhood split between his mum's flat and his dad's more affluent home, and went mostly to Catholic private schools, according to a journalist who has written about him. He joined the National Front (now National Rally) at 16 and dropped out of uni to work for the party full-time. He led its 2019 European election list at 23, then took over as party president from Marine Le Pen in November 2022.

It isn't the first time. In 2024 France 2 reported, citing three people once close to him, that he ran an anonymous X account sharing racist messages from 2015 to 2017. He denied it flatly. There's also a European prosecutors' probe into how the old far-right ID group spent EU money, with raids in four countries in June. Bardella, who now heads the successor Patriots group, called it harassment, and the sources we read show no charges against him.

On the harm test, his record is what counts. In the European Parliament he voted against the Nature Restoration Act, ending new petrol and diesel car sales by 2035, a 42.5% renewables target and halving pesticide use. He also voted against most of the migration and asylum pact and against backing Ukraine in July 2024. When we looked, Euroverify found that his claim that EU officials wanted X banned had no evidence behind it, and that he misrepresented the Romania election story.

We couldn't open a reliable record of his votes on LGBTQ+ issues, so we won't guess. He was absent from the 2022 vote on putting abortion rights in the EU Charter, as were all RN MEPs. He also leads a group that grew out of Viktor Orbán's project, so the company he keeps is part of the picture.

The good stuff is where this goes thin. We found no charity record, no known kind acts and nothing showing him standing up for others at a cost to himself. A rough start in life is real and a critic's description of him as a ghost MEP is just that, one critic's. Honest answer: we looked and came up empty.

So where does that leave us? The allegations are denied and unproven, and we've treated them that way. Even without them, the voting record on climate and migration, plus the fact-checked claim, is enough for a no. Dodgy messages from a teenager would be one thing, but this is an adult's voting record.