Hegemonic Crisis and Reaction: The Case of Jordan Bardella

Abstract

This article examines how Jordan Bardella reinscribes the ongoing global hegemonic shift (particularly the rise of China) into a narrative of crisis that seeks to redefine Europe’s place within the world-system and the actors deemed central to that transformation. Drawing on theories of systemic cycles of accumulation and employing Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological tool, the article analyzes Bardella’s interventions in the European Parliament between 2019 and 2024. It argues that Bardella fuses geoeconomic tensions, security anxieties, and cultural-identity concerns into a unified frame of civilizational threat through which he attempts to reorganize the European order of discourse. By naturalizing sovereignty as the interpretive axis of the crisis and offering an alternative to the supranational vocabulary of integration, Bardella seeks to position the far right, embodied by himself, as a political force capable of interpreting the hegemonic transition and shaping the continent’s future direction.