A crucial trial for the future of Marine Le Pen and her party opens this Monday in Paris. Over the next seven weeks, the court will examine whether the former National Front (since 2018 called National Rally) used funds from the European Parliament to pay its workers in France.
Concretely, the prosecution believes that the far-right group launched a “system of misappropriation” of the allowances allocated by the European Union to each MP to pay parliamentary assistants (they were then 21,000 euros per month). These assistants would have actually worked, in whole or in part, for the party in France. In 2018, the European Parliament estimated the damage caused at 6.8 million euros, over the period 2004 to 2016.
Alongside Marine Le Pen, more than twenty personalities – past and present – from the party sit in the dock. Including Louis Aliot, current mayor of Perpignan. Accusations of embezzlement of public funds through the aforementioned irregular labor system, as well as concealment and complicity, weigh against all.
Le Pen and other former MEPs face sanctions of up to a million euros fine and a possible ban from standing in elections for a period of five years. Judicial experts believe that in the event of conviction, it is very likely that the sentence will be suspended pending a final decision against the various appeals that Marine Le Pen and her co-accused should present.
It seems difficult for justice to prevent Le Pen from running in the next presidential election scheduled for 2027 (even if there are some exceptions to this rule in French case law, relating to local or regional elections). In any case, in anticipation of these future appeals which should delay the final judgment by several years, it is very likely that Marine Le Pen’s next presidential campaign will take place in parallel with the legal process of this case.
Nine years of research
In reality, the affair of parliamentary assistants has accompanied Marine Le Pen since she took over from her father and became party leader. In 2014, the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), the European Parliament’s supervisory body, received the first anonymous information about possible irregularities in the contracts of parliamentary assistants from the former National Front.
In February 2015, these suspicions were confirmed when the party itself published an official organization chart including sixteen MEPs and twenty parliamentary assistants occupying positions linked to political responsibilities in France and not in Brussels or Strasbourg. In March of the same year, Martin Schulz, then president of Parliament, notified the case to the French Ministry of Justice, which in turn referred it to the public prosecutor’s office.
From there began a long investigation which lasted more than nine years before leading to the trial, largely due to the numerous appeals filed by the lawyers of the far-right party and the refusal of the accused to appear at the trial of the majority judicial summonses.
Investigations revealed, among other evidence, an email that the party’s treasurer, Wallerand de Saint-Just, had sent to Le Pen to warn him of the serious financial situation. “In the years to come, we will not be able to move forward if we do not make big savings thanks to the European Parliament and if we do not obtain significant returns [por parte del Estado francés, que reembolsa una parte de las campañas electorales].
A strategy confirmed by the testimonies of several protagonists – today breaking with their former party – who affirmed before the press and French investigators that Le Pen would have given explicit instructions to European deputies to hire a single assistant and that the rest of the budget would be transferred and managed by the party centrally.
If the facts were confirmed, there would also be economic damage for France since several of the people who would have been paid with funds from Brussels worked on various electoral campaigns in France. And the expense linked to their salaries was then reimbursed to the party by the state.
It is estimated that the training then accumulated a significant debt, which continued to grow in the following years and reached 22 million euros in 2022. As the European Parliament itself pointed out, as a civil party before the French courts, the expenses of the parliamentary assistants of 23 deputies – around 6.8 million euros – then represented more than double the payroll of AN .
Since the opening of the first investigations, Marine Le Pen has defended that parliamentary assistants were not obliged to work only for MEPs. According to him, the important thing is that the work of the assistants “was above all political”.
This Monday, as soon as she arrived in court, Le Pen claimed “not to have broken any rules” and declared that she had appeared “calm” before the start of the trial. “We have many arguments to defend what, in my opinion, is parliamentary freedom, and that is what is called into question in this case,”
Jean-Marie Le Pen absent, Bardella indicted
Jordan Bardella will not sit on the bench, despite the newspaper recently Release revealed the preview of a new book which accuses the current president of AN of having actively participated in the preparation of false evidence. Bardella, who briefly held the position of assistant to a Member of the European Parliament, allegedly wrote several notes by hand – a posteriori – to justify work that he never carried out.
After a first resounding denial, the current president of the AN was less categorical in front of the cameras in a special episode of the show. Further investigation dedicated to the opening of the trial. “I am not included in the judicial investigation,” he simply replied.
Among the accused, however, are Thierry Légier, former bodyguard of Jean-Marie Le Pen and then his daughter, and Micheline Bruna, private secretary of Jean Marie-Le Pen. The prosecution estimates that their salaries would also come from the assignment of parliamentary assistants.
The former president and co-founder of the National Front, now 96 years old, will not be present at the hearing for health reasons, although he is another defendant. Since February, she has been under judicial guardianship, which gives her three daughters the right to control her decisions. His last public interview dates back to 2023, broadcast on the Sud Radio station.
The day the process was opened, Médiapart released a video of Le Pen at her home singing with members of the neo-Nazi group Blood and Honor. Her daughter Marine announced in the hours that followed that she was going to file a complaint against the members of the said group for abuse of weakness.
