Jordan Bardella has renewed his demand that France shut mosques controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and dissolve the networks built around them, keeping pressure on a question that has gone nowhere in Brussels.
The National Rally president, who chairs the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament, said his party would proscribe the movement if it won power in France. “We will close radical mosques and dissolve all organisations that promote Islamism,” he told GB News.
He was speaking on September 4 at the Reform UK conference in Birmingham, England, where he signed a memorandum of understanding with Nigel Farage on stopping Channel crossings.
Bardella has previously put the number of mosques he regards as radical and under Brotherhood control at 139, and has called for the dissolution of any association or network that repeats the movement’s ideas.
That figure comes from an intelligence report presented to France’s national defence and security council on May 21, 2025. It counted 139 places of worship affiliated to Musulmans de France, described as the Brotherhood’s main French offshoot.
The report put that at about 7 per cent of the 2,800 mosques recorded in the country, with a further 68 considered close to the federation. Attendance at both averaged some 91,000 worshippers on Fridays.
It also identified 280 associations tied to the movement, against the 53 the federation acknowledges, and 21 schools teaching about 4,200 pupils.
France’s National Assembly voted 157 to 101 on January 22 for a non-binding resolution asking the European Commission to place the Brotherhood and its leaders on the European Union’s list of terrorist organisations. The Dutch House of Representatives passed a comparable motion in March.
The Commission has maintained that the initiative rests with member states. That position was challenged in February in an oral question signed by more than 30 MEPs from the Patriots for Europe, European Conservatives and Reformists and Europe of Sovereign Nations groups.
French interior minister Laurent Nuñez has since described such a listing as impossible to implement, telling Le Monde that no Western democracy had taken that route and that France preferred to act case by case.
The argument also has a Brussels edge. The Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations (FEMYSO), a network named in the French report and based in the EU capital, is due to mark the European Action Day Against Islamophobia on September 21 with EU co-funding.
