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

A DECADE AGO Jordan Bardella was a mere teenager, spending hours after school firing at enemy combatants on “Call of Duty” video games. Today the 28-year-old leader of the may be weeks away from becoming prime minister of France, and its youngest ever by a long way. After a two-round legislative election on June 30th and July 7th, his party could win enough seats to form a government. The ascent of Marine Le Pen’s young protégé from obscurity to the cusp of high office is one of the more improbable in modern French politics.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 (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 , 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.”