In a gilded palace directly opposite the Élysée, Jordan Bardella strode on to the stage of the Théâtre Marigny to launch his new book.

It was billed as a defining moment for the 30-year-old National Rally (RN) chief in his dizzying ascent from protégé to French presidential contender.

The theatre’s 1,000 seats were nearly full to watch one of the European Right’s great hopes. Marine Le Pen sat in the front row, watching the political prodigy she once called “my lion cub” lead the pride.

“I wrote everything I heard, everything I felt,” Mr Bardella told the audience, describing his book, What the French Want, as the “fruit of encounters” with 20 carefully selected French workers, artisans and small entrepreneurs “who get up early and never count their hours”.

An Elabe poll published on Nov 1 puts Mr Bardella on around 35 to 37.5 per cent in the first round of the 2027 presidential race, more than twice the rating of his nearest rival, Édouard Philippe, the former prime minister.

Ms Le Pen had long been the RN’s natural candidate for 2027, but her recent conviction in the EU assistants case brought a five-year ban from public office. Even if the conviction is overturned on appeal in January, it will probably be too late for her to campaign, she said, adding that in that case, the choice of Mr Bardella becomes “obvious” and “necessary in the interests of the country”.

However, even if Ms Le Pen were allowed to run she scores slightly lower than Mr Bardella at 34 per cent.

Brice Teinturier, the deputy chief executive of Ipsos BVA, the polling organisation, calls the shift historic. “Bardella now exists by himself. He is no longer a simple doublure [stunt double],” he told The Telegraph. “This is not a bubble. The RN brand is strong, rising, and a solid third of French voters want the change it embodies.”

It is in this context that Mr Bardella’s book tour has begun to resemble a proto-presidential campaign. After the Paris launch, he travelled to Bruay-la-Buissière, in the Pas-de-Calais, where 1,200 people queued in the rain for his first signing.

“We missed Marine last time,” a grandmother told him. “We weren’t going to miss you.” Teenagers giggled, pensioners called him “Mr President”, and Mr Bardella posed for selfies between mouthfuls of Haribo.

The moment was clipped into a viral TikTok for his two million followers, who are fed endless bursts of soft-focus normality, gym clips and carefully crafted behind-the-scenes footage.

These are not random tour dates. They trace a political map: the former mining towns of the north, the Yonne, where the RN swept all three constituencies, and above all the Mediterranean arc of Toulon, Nice and Marseille, cities which could fall to the RN in next March’s municipal elections.

Credit: Jordan Bardella/TikTok

Toulon is the great prize. Marseille, once impregnable, is now in play. Nice has been destabilised by the alliance of Éric Ciotti, a local Right-wing baron, with the RN.

Winning even one major city would be historic. Winning several would give Mr Bardella the legitimacy, funding and mayoral networks that Ms Le Pen lacked in 2022.

Mr Bardella’s mix of digital reach and carefully cultivated grassroots momentum has prompted comparisons with another rising political star, Zohran Mamdani, who recently swept to power in New York.

They sit at opposite poles ideologically – Mr Bardella nationalist, anti-immigration, Eurosceptic; Mr Mamdani progressive, anti-capitalist, pro-housing – but the energy, the digital language, and the anti-establishment mood are uncannily similar.

Both are children of immigration. Mr Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian parents. Mr Bardella grew up in a Franco-Italian family with North African roots on his father’s side in a Seine-Saint-Denis tower block. Both present themselves as avatars of a new political era.

Mr Mamdani’s campaign was a street-level revolt of tenants’ unions, bodegas and stoop-side TikToks. Mr Bardella’s ascent is orchestrated like a streaming series launch, with choreographed lighting, staged entrances and a tone of gathering inevitability.

Dominique Moïsi, a veteran political analyst, finds the comparison both revealing and limited. “They are both young, energetic, radical in their own ways,” he says. “Although Bardella is younger than Mamdani, they share the support of the Z generation. A lot of young people are attracted by their age.

He added that they both represented the French attitude known as “dégagisme” that the elites needed to be kicked out of power.

Mr Bardella’s appeal among the over-50s, once Ms Le Pen’s stronghold, is also rising. He speaks a more economically liberal language than his mentor, citing Nicolas Sarkozy’s “France that gets up early” and sprinkling speeches with Macron-style talk of enterprise, innovation and AI. In private meetings, he promises pro-growth tax cuts and a freer hand for entrepreneurs.

Mr Teinturier of Ipsos sees the strategy clearly. Mr Bardella is capturing “the segment that still resists the RN, professionals and older voters, with a more liberal tone” while still benefiting from Ms Le Pen’s long campaign to end the demonisation of the party founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

But the economy remains the RN’s Achilles’ heel. For all Mr Bardella’s talk of fiscal seriousness, the party’s behaviour in parliament tells a different story. On economic policy, the RN lurches between free market rhetoric and Left-wing tax activism, sometimes within days.

In the most recent budget debates, RN deputies repeatedly voted with the Left to revive the “exit tax”, impose a GAFA levy on digital giants and add a surcharge on share buybacks. Government ministers accused the RN of “adding €34 billion in 24 hours”.

Economists warn that this confusion extends to the party’s flagship “counter-budget”, which claims it can save €100 billion through cuts to immigration, EU contributions and undefined bureaucracy – estimates widely dismissed as fantasy.

Mr Bardella’s recent call for the European Central Bank to buy French debt directly provoked howls of protest from eurozone officials and economists, who labelled it unrealistic, dangerous and a breach of the ECB mandate.

Even so, such credibility problems are “becoming fewer and fewer”, says Mr Teinturier, who notes that Emmanuel Macron will leave behind “staggering deficits” of his own. But the RN still faces a glass ceiling in any second-round contest, and presidential campaigns cannot be improvised. “Marine Le Pen has that experience. Bardella does not,” he adds.

Beneath the packaging lies a harder edge. Mr Bardella says he wants France to become “the most repressive country in Europe” on crime. He calls for ending automatic sentence reductions, restoring mandatory minimums and reintroducing military service.

On Europe, he strikes a sharper sovereignist tone than Le Pen, and leads a new hard-Right bloc in the European Parliament launched by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz.

Moïsi argues the RN’s underlying world view remains intact. Their “pro-Israel stance today is not driven by sympathy, but because they are anti-Arab and anti-Muslim,” he says, adding that the party remains historically pro-Putin and suspicious of the West.

Some critics go further. Charles Consigny, a lawyer and essayist, accuses Mr Bardella of practising “takiya”, or political dissimulation. “He pretends to be a respectable conservative when he is in fact far Right,” he told Le Figaro.

The comparison with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is irresistible. Both rose young from the hard Right, both softened their image to expand, both inherited movements built by older ideologues.

Yet Ms Meloni has governed more cautiously than expected, constrained by markets and Brussels. Whether Mr Bardella would do the same or rupture decisively with Europe remains one of the big unknowns in European politics.

For all the momentum, doubts remain about whether Mr Bardella has the depth to lead France. He never attended university. He has never run a ministry, or held a job outside the RN beyond a brief stint at his father’s drinks distribution business.

Philippe Moreau Chevrolet, a political communications expert at Sciences Po, warns he could be crushed by a French presidential campaign.

“The president must answer to every question. He must be like ChatGPT. We vote for ChatGPT kind of guys,” he explained.

“The question is: are the French angry and bored enough to vote for literally anybody outside the system? The French may moan a lot, but populism still struggles to take root here.”

Xavier Bertrand, the conservative president of Hauts-de-France, thundered last week that “no one wants to admit that he’s hollow, he hasn’t done the work, he knows nothing about real life”. Even inside the RN, some old hands mutter that the young leader has mastered posture and performance, but not the hard grind of governing.

After seeing him close up, Édouard Philippe, his main rival, was blunt. “He has real media savvy, but he is technically useless, and his superficiality on substantive issues is obvious.” François Bayrou, the veteran centrist, was no kinder. “He’s either Napoleon or a fake. He creates an illusion for 10 minutes, then there is nothing.”

Ms Le Pen rejects such attacks, insisting her chosen heir has “a limitless love of France”. French history, she says, “is made up of people who, at a very young age, managed to change its course.”

In Mr Bardella’s book, each chapter reads like a self-contained vignette: a fisherman railing against EU quotas and offshore wind farms, a baker ruined by energy bills, a farmer crushed by regulation, a judge despairing at “revolving door justice”.

His mother, who raised him alone, receives a tender tribute. She lives on €18,000 a year in pension and welfare support.

Conspicuously absent is the political matriarch. Marine Le Pen is granted a single paragraph: “I chose to fight alongside her every day, to accompany her to power with the conviction that she alone will give the French people the future they deserve.”

There is deference. But for a man widely seen as Ms Le Pen’s heir, the brevity is deliberate. Mr Bardella is telling the French, ever so politely, that he is ready to rule in his own right.

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