French nationalist leader Bardella visits Poland to meet president, opposition and observe Belarus border

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

French nationalist leader Jordan Bardella, the president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) party, has completed a two-day visit to Poland in which he held talks on cooperation with the main right-wing and far-right opposition parties as well as opposition-aligned President Karol Nawrocki.

Bardella, who will likely stand in next year’s French presidential elections if Le Pen’s recent criminal conviction is not overturned, also visited Poland’s border with Belarus, where he praised tough measures to prevent migrants from illegally crossing into the European Union and blamed Russia for the crisis there.

Bardella’s visit to Poland began on Thursday, when he visited the memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, calling them “a universal symbol of courage and human dignity”.

The late founder of RN (formerly the National Front), Jean-Marie Le Pen (Marine’s father), repeatedly downplayed the Holocaust. In 1999, a German court convicted him of inciting racial hatred after he called the German-Nazi death camps and their gas chambers a mere “detail” of World War Two history.

Following the visit, Bardella met with Nawrocki, whose office said the pair held talks “on the future of Europe, security, and the role of sovereign states in the European community”. Nawrocki is a right-wing Eurosceptic who has regularly called for reform of the EU to make it a looser union of sovereign states.

Commenting afterwards, Bardella said that “Poland is today an indispensable country for building the new European architecture that we fervently desire, founded on strength, border protection, and economic growth”.

The French nationalist leader was then hosted in parliament by Krzysztof Bosak, one of the leaders of the far-right Confederation (Konfederacja), Poland’s second-largest opposition group.

Bosak’s faction within Confederation (which is an alliance made up of two main strands) is part of the same nationalist Patriots.eu group in the European Parliament as RN.

Speaking alongside Bardella at a press conference in parliament, Bosak said that one of the issues they had agreed on is to “jointly oppose Ukraine’s accession to the EU” because “Ukraine fails to meet EU standards and creates completely unfair economic competition for sectors that are crucial to our countries”.

On Friday, Bardella visited Poland’s highly fortified border with Belarus alongside Paweł Szefernaker, the head of Nawrocki’s cabinet.

Since 2021, Belarus has encouraged and assisted tens of thousands of migrants – mainly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa – in attempting to cross into the EU illegally over that border, prompting successive Polish governments to bolster security there.

While Marine Le Pen has made friendly comments towards Russia – and her party received a loan from a Russian bank – Bardella made clear during his visit today that “Russia and its Belarusian proxy” are engineering the migration crisis as part of a “hybrid war against Europe”.

“By defending one of Europe’s outer borders, Poland is in fact defending the whole of European civilisation, protecting our values and our identities, in the face of one of the greatest threats of the 21st century,” he declared.

After returning to Warsaw, Bardella then held talks with the leadership of the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), Poland’s ruling party from 2015 to 2023 and now the main opposition.

The discussions had “demonstrated that there are many, very important, absolutely fundamental, common points that define our goals, our way of thinking, our views”, said PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński. He expressed hope that Bardella would win next year’s presidential election.

Bardella likewise said that, if he becomes president and PiS returns to power at the 2027 Polish parliamentary election, “our two movements will have the opportunity to reshape the functioning of the EU” by preventing migration and rolling back environmental policies.

Le Pen, who finished second in the last two presidential elections, is currently banned from running next year due to a conviction for embezzling funds from the European Parliament, though she is appealing against the verdict. Polls indicate that either she or Bardella would be the frontrunner in the 2027 election.

Poland is currently ruled by a more liberal coalition led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who is a former president of the European Council. His government regularly clashes with Nawrocki and PiS. It has also sought to toughen migration policies, which it argues were too weak when PiS was in power.

Tusk’s government has enjoyed close relations with current French President Emmanuel Macron, with whom last year it signed a major new security treaty. On a visit to Poland in April, Macron declared that relations between Paris and Warsaw are at a “historic level”.

During PiS’s time in office, it sought to cultivate close relations with other European right-wing and far-right leaders, including Le Pen, Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Mikołaj Bujak/KPRP

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.