Jordan Bardella sues Mediapart for defamation after allegations of anti-Semitic messages

– De här idéerna är fullständigt galna. They are not my ideas, nor did the 17-year-old me then carry them. Jag bestrider detta, säger Jordan Bardella.

He is today 31 years old, leads the National Assembly and is expected to become prime minister if Marine Le Pen is elected president next year. Through his lawyer, Bardella has now filed a lawsuit for defamation against the newspaper Mediapart, which is known in France for its investigative journalism.

Mediapart claims its journalists were given access to "dozens" of messages from Bardella allegedly published in mid- to late 2013.

Då var Bardella 17 och 18 år gammal. In several of the messages, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are advanced about Jews dominating the world.

"All the banks are controlled by the Jews," it says in one place. French ministers and American central bankers are singled out as Jewish infiltrators, and it is claimed that the Jews want to control the world through Israel, "with Jerusalem as its capital".

"The Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them and plunder them; a Zionist is a Jew by necessity, and deep down," reads one of the text messages attributed to Bardella.

At that time, Bardella had just become a member of the National Front, and Marine Le Pen's "normalization process" had begun. It meant, among other things, distancing oneself from Jean-Marie Le Pen's anti-Semitism.

But one of the messages attributed to Bardella claims that "the basic ideology has not changed" since 1972, when fascists, royalists and a former SS-Waffen officer formed the party. The following year, in 2014, Bardella became the party's first name in Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris.

People who got to know him then tell Mediapart that he was inspired by the convicted anti-Semite Alain Soral and Holocaust denier Eustace Mullins.

Bardella denies this - and Marine Le Pen says in a comment that "no normal person can believe this nonsense."

In the French left-wing opposition, however, several heavy names demand Bardella's resignation.