MORMANT, France — The new darling of France’s far-right has a message for the European establishment: “We’re coming.”

Just 23, Jordan Bardella is the rising star of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party — which was formerly known as the National Front.

Bardella is all but guaranteed to be elected to the European Parliament in elections beginning Thursday, where the National Rally is part of an alliance of nationalist parties that aims, as he says, to “upturn the table.”

United by their desire to stop migrants at Europe's external borders, "defend" European culture and identity and recover powers from the European Union for national governments, far-right lawmakers hope to transform the 28-country bloc from within. Youthful activists and candidates like Bardella are among the loudest voices clamoring for change.

"It is time to take back power, it is time to make us feel at home again," the former geography student told hundreds of supporters to rapturous applause during a recent rally outside Paris.

Extremists are expected to do well at the ballot box this week. Polls suggest the largest group of far-right parties is predicted to more than double its number of seats, with the far-right as a whole expected to control as much as 18 percent of Parliament, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank. Such parties currently make up about 10 percent of the legislature, which makes laws that affect the daily lives of some 508 million people.

This predicted surge for the far-right as well as parties that are critical of the E.U. from both the right and the left represents a “blow” to the European establishment, according to Matthijs Rooduijn, a political sociologist at the University of Amsterdam.

The success of the far-right at the ballot box was described as an “earthquake” after the last election five years ago and such parties now appear poised to do even better, he said.

Polls also predict that the current "grand coalition" between center-right and center-left parties that have worked together to control the European Parliament since 1979 will lose its majority for the first time.

Pro-European Union forces represented by leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron are embattled as they cling to their vision of how the bloc should work and what values it should stand for.

Jordan Bardella is a candidate for Marine Le Pen's National Rally party in France. Alexis Duclos / NBC News

Since 2014, the unity of this club of nations has frayed. In 2015, more than a million asylum-seekers and migrants arrived at the borders of Europe, triggering a political crisis that has yet to be resolved. And a year later, Britain — one of the E.U.’s largest economies — voted to leave the bloc.

Lawmaker Guy Verhofstadt, who is the president of a pro-E.U. group in the Parliament, has framed the upcoming election as a “battle for Europe’s soul.”

A xenophobic reputation

Since taking over the party helm in 2011, Le Pen has tried to shake off the party’s reputation as xenophobic, anti-Semitic and consequently unelectable. The National Front was founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has been convicted on several occasions of contesting crimes against humanity or inciting racial hatred. He was expelled from the party in 2015 after repeating his view that the Holocaust was a "detail of history."

Marine Le Pen did win almost 11 million votes in France's 2017 presidential election — more than 1 in 3 of the total cast — but she still sees a need to rebrand the party.

The eloquent and clean-shaven Bardella, who was raised by a single-mother in a rough Paris suburb known for its large migrant population, fits in well with those efforts.

Bardella rejects the multicultural France he grew up in. “A multicultural society is especially and above all a multiconflictual society,” he told supporters who had gathered in an airy barn outside the rural town of Mormant.

In its manifesto, the National Rally calls for more controls at Europe’s borders as well as the reinstatement of national boundaries within the bloc.

Even though migration to Europe has fallen significantly in recent months, Bardella said France should take inspiration from Italy's anti-immigrant Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.