A hard-right 28-year-old could soon be France’s prime minister

The son of an Italian-born mother and a father whose family arrived in France from Italy, Mr Bardella grew up in social housing in Seine-Saint-Denis, a multicultural northern banlieue (suburb) of Paris. What could have held him back in life became his political selling-point. “I have my roots there, a part of myself and my family’s history” Mr Bardella told Le Monde, recalling the drug dealers that hung out on a battered sofa on the landing outside his flat. “I’m in politics for everything that I lived through back there.”