Bardella sets out how the RN would defy the EU from within, with implications for Luxembourg

Jordan Bardella has stopped talking about leaving the European Union. Instead, the president of France's Rassemblement National (RN) is describing in increasing detail how a government led by his party would remain a member while systematically defying the rules that bind one — a strategy that one critic has summarised as telling Brussels you want to leave without saying so.

In an interview with Politico published on 15 June 2026, Bardella set out the most concrete element yet: France would slash what it pays into the EU budget. "Instead of voting a contribution to the EU budget of 12 or 15 billion, well, it will be halved," he said, calling the current sum "excessive" and adding that Paris would press the European Commission to cut its own running costs.

The remarks matter because the RN is the clear frontrunner for the 2027 presidential election, polling around 35–37.5% in the first round. Bardella is the party's designated candidate should Marine Le Pen — barred from office in March 2025 over the embezzlement of EU parliamentary funds — fail to overturn her ban; the Paris Court of Appeal is due to rule on 7 July 2026. For a small, deeply integrated member state such as Luxembourg, whose economy is wired into the single market and whose workforce pours across open borders every morning, the blueprint is not an abstraction.

What the RN actually proposes

Since around 2018 the party has dropped both "Frexit" and an explicit pledge to leave the euro, recasting itself as a force that would, in Bardella's framing, "change everything without destroying anything." The substance, drawn from his statements and from analyses by the European Council on Foreign Relations, UnHerd and Brussels Signal, includes:

• Budget: halving France's contribution and demanding a rebate of the kind Germany and the Netherlands enjoy.
• Primacy of national law: a constitutional referendum to assert the supremacy of the French Constitution over EU law, especially on migration.
• Institutions: shrinking the Commission toward a "secretariat" and handing legislative initiative to national governments via the Council.
• Free movement: renegotiating Schengen, introducing "national preference" for French citizens in jobs and housing, leaving the EU Migration Pact and ending birthright citizenship.
• Single market and energy: reopening single-market terms and opting out of EU electricity pricing in favour of a national nuclear-based rate.

On the most sovereignty-defining question, Bardella has been explicit. "I am a staunch republican and, as such, committed to the supremacy of the French Constitution," he told Brussels Signal — a direct challenge to the EU principle that European law takes precedence over national law.

Instead of voting a contribution to the EU budget of 12 or 15 billion, well, it will be halved.

How far could it go without changing the treaties?

The answer determines everything, and it is uncomfortable for both sides. Some moves need no treaty change at all. France could wield its veto over decisions requiring unanimity — aid to Ukraine, sanctions on Russia, the post-2028 budget framework, enlargement and institutional reform. It already votes its EU contribution inside its national budget, a practice tolerated even though it sits awkwardly with EU law. And asserting constitutional primacy, as Poland's courts did, requires only a domestic decision — though it would invite infringement proceedings and what analysts call "massive legal uncertainty."

The harder ambitions run into the treaties themselves. Rewriting free movement, reshaping the single market or unwinding the euro would require treaty change and the unanimous consent of all 27 members — consent the others would not give. That is why commentators from Wolfgang Münchau to the ECFR argue the RN programme, pursued in full, would not produce a clean "Frexit" so much as a slow collision: France breaking enough rules that it ends up functionally outside the club it formally remains in. France's real numbers complicate the budget pitch, too. Eurostat-based data put France's 2024 gross contribution near €22.3 billion and its net contribution at about €5.8 billion — well below Germany's €19.5 billion net.

Why Luxembourg cannot look away

No member state is more exposed to this experiment than the Grand Duchy. A founding member of the EU and host to the Court of Justice and the European Investment Bank, Luxembourg has built prosperity on exactly the freedoms the RN would contest.

The clearest pressure point is labour. In 2025 some 233,260 cross-border workers commuted into Luxembourg — about 47% of its salaried workforce, according to figures compiled from Luxembourg's IGSS by the cross-border observatories AGURAM and IBA·OIE. Of those, roughly 126,600 live in France, alongside about 53,360 in Germany and 53,300 in Belgium. Just over half, in other words, cross the French border each day under EU free-movement rules. A French government that reordered Schengen or pursued "national preference" would reach directly into the engine room of Luxembourg's economy.

Trade is the second exposure. Roughly 85% of Luxembourg's trade is with other EU states, and about 90% of its foreign trade is with EU partners, more than half of it with France, Germany and Belgium. The financial sector that generates around a quarter of GDP depends on the single market's passporting and the stability of the euro. A protracted Franco-Brussels standoff over budgets, law and borders would unsettle precisely the rules Luxembourg treats as the floor beneath its open model.

None of this is yet policy; it is a manifesto from a party that does not hold the Élysée and faces a presidential gatekeeper in Emmanuel Macron, whose assent any constitutional referendum would need. But with the RN ascendant and Le Pen's fate due within weeks, the question for Luxembourg is no longer whether to take the blueprint seriously, but how to prepare for a France that may decide the EU's rules are negotiable from the inside.