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PARIS -- French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, her National Rally party and its allies closed ranks Tuesday behind her running mate in next year's presidential election, Jordan Bardella, in the face of media accusations that he made antisemitic remarks as a young party member.
The 31-year-old Bardella, who Le Pen says will be her prime minister if she wins the presidency in May, vigorously denied authorship of the comments about supposed Jewish banking monopolies and other antisemitic conspiracy theories that investigative website Mediapart attributed to him and published Monday.
It said they were written more than a decade ago. They included years when Bardella, now the National Rally president, was a teenage member of the party's predecessor, the National Front. It was founded by Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who repeatedly denied the Holocaust and was convicted multiple times of hate speech before his death in 2025.
Allegations of antisemitism touch a particular nerve at the National Rally because Le Pen has worked for years to distance herself from her father's sulfurous legacy.