Bardella Positions for 2027 as Khashoggi Probe Opens in Paris

The day's lead political story sat at the Rassemblement National. Jordan Bardella has begun overtly positioning himself to take over as the party's 2027 presidential candidate ahead of the July 7 Paris appeals court ruling in the FN European Parliament assistants case, France Info reported. The verdict will decide whether Marine Le Pen can stand, and inside the RN it is being treated as the de facto opening of the presidential campaign. Bardella has resumed small off-the-record briefings with journalists ("le off") after the issue was raised in a working meeting with Le Pen a month ago — an RN deputy close to her had warned in spring that confining access to the Bolloré group risked branding the 30-year-old party president as "the billionaire's candidate." His international profile has expanded in parallel: he now attends international summits alone, gave a Tuesday interview to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung setting out his foreign-policy outlook, and has met multiple ambassadors in Paris, with a foreign trip in preparation for the coming weeks.

A second high-profile judicial track opened simultaneously. A Paris magistrate accepted the complaint filed by Reporters Without Borders and opened a judicial investigation into the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. France 24 and RFI reported the magistrate has named Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, former Saudi intelligence official Saud al-Qahtani and others among those targeted, citing France's universal jurisdiction over qualifying crimes against journalists. The opening of a formal probe in a major European jurisdiction reopens the diplomatic file Paris had tried to keep contained since 2018.

Civil-rights pressure ran into the Saturday cycle. The prefect of Lot-et-Garonne publicly condemned death threats made against the mayor of Agen and the head of the local mosque association, naming the threats as part of the wider far-right hostility tracked across French municipalities in recent months and announcing reinforced police protection. Six people were detained in central Paris after a Palestinian flag was unfurled on the Eiffel Tower during a Nakba commemoration; the prefecture said the detentions involved the unauthorised access of the monument and not the protest itself, and the six are expected to face administrative charges.

Diplomatically the Élysée confirmed Pope Leo XIV's first official state visit to France in 18 years, with Politico Europe, RFI and France 24 carrying the announcement of dates and the planned schedule of stops including Lourdes and Lyon. The visit, the first since Benedict XVI in 2008, comes against the backdrop of the broader French political turbulence following the fall of the Lecornu government and the prolonged budget impasse, with Macron continuing to look for a parliamentary configuration that can hold.