The extract was widely disseminated on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 13, after Marine Le Pen’s indignant reaction to the demands of the prosecution in the trial of the European parliamentary assistants of the National Front (FN, converted into National Rally, RN, in 2018). We see the far-right leader, twenty years younger, facing Jean-François Copé, then spokesperson for Jean-Pierre Raffarin’s government. The context: a few weeks before the 2004 regional elections, Alain Juppé, potential presidential candidate, has just been sentenced to ten years of disqualification (the sentence will be reduced to one year on appeal) in the case of fictitious city jobs from Paris. .
Marine Le Pen therefore considers that very little attention is paid to these cases of embezzlement and deplores the fact that Mr. Juppé does not abandon political life. “The French are not tired of hearing about business, they are tired of there being business!, gets upset on the set of the show “Crosswords.” They are tired of seeing elected officials embezzling money, it’s a scandal. (…) Respecting democracy means not stealing French money. » Following the old lepenist motto “Attention above, clean hands”, Marine Le Pen was then an ardent defender of the moralization of French political life, a fight that continued… until she herself was threatened by the law.
Thus, in the early 2010s, when Nicolas Sarkozy and his supporters were surrounded by businessmen and local socialist elected officials were convicted of embezzlement – a crime now charged to the three-time presidential candidate – the FN secretary general, Steeve Briois and her president, Marine Le Pen, are quick to demand “operation clean hands” and immediate resignation – of the socialist deputy for Bouches-du-Rhône Sylvie Andrieux.
The wind is turning
“The weapon of ineligibility must be used with much more rigor”wrote Marine Le Pen, in 2012, in her second and last book, So that France lives (ed. Jacques Grancher), in a chapter intended to “restore public morals”. Two years later, after the indictment of Thomas Thévenoud, François Hollande’s short-lived Secretary of State accused of not paying his taxes, Steeve Briois underlines in an editorial published on the FN website: “Public morality has always been one of our main battles. Intransigence in this area is the sine qua non condition for renewing the bond of trust that must unite a people and those to whom it has entrusted directing its destiny. »
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