Marine Le Pen defended herself step by step, with her energy intact after seven long hours of interrogation: this must be the custom of parliamentary debate nights. She did not give an inch, with both pride and authority, and the defense lawyers only served as meager foils. The Pas-de-Calais deputy certainly often intervenes in the process of the European assistants of the National Front (FN, converted into the National Rally in 2018), when her former collaborators drown in their contradictions. But on Monday, October 14, and until Wednesday, before the Paris criminal court, it is she who is directly accused of “embezzlement of public funds” and had the intention of taking her action.
Marine Le Pen, however, finds herself on a knife edge, between an offensive political defense and the need to justify the work of her assistants. “The European Parliament swallows up the deputies, there you can sleep, eat, go to the hairdresser, everything is done so that the elected representatives live in isolation. said the far-right leader. Our job is to get them out of this living environment, to get them into politics. » For her, it is not possible to distinguish the president of the RN from the MEP, “In Parliament, when we were three, then seven, we had an Epsilonesque weight. We are left with the fact that the word politics, the mandate, is also political activity.”
The same for parliamentary assistants, “shared”, that is, they worked for several deputies, “without the administration telling us anything”assures Mme LePen. However, the deputy works for his party and his assistants for him: this is what the European Parliament accuses him of having paid assistants who actually worked at his expense for the party, which is explicitly prohibited. “I don’t feel that I have committed the slightest irregularity”However, the deputy protests, who sees in the trial a shrewd settling of accounts by the former Social Democratic president of Parliament, Martin Schulz.
“It is not for the party, it is for the benefit of the party”
Mᵉ Patrick Maisonneuve, Parliament’s lawyer, reminds her that she declared: “Where parliamentary assistants were not strictly occupied with parliamentary duties, they could, at the request of their MP, work for the party of which all MPs are members…” Marina Le Pen “formal competitions” having said that. Bad luck, he said it and wrote: this is an opening statement read before the investigating judge. “You’re looking for the little beasttempts the accused, It’s not for the party, it’s for the benefit of the party. »
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