The leader of France’s far-right National Rally, Marine Le Pen, is facing a trial that may determine her political future. Accused of embezzling EU parliamentary funds, Le Pen and 24 National Rally officials are under intense scrutiny.
Paris prosecutors on Wednesday requested a 2-year prison sentence for far-right leader Marine Le Pen and an additional 5-year period of ineligibility to run for office, in a trial over the suspected embezzlement of European Parliament funds where her ability to participate in the 2027 presidential race is at stake.
The National Rally party and 25 of its officials, including Le Pen, are accused of having used money intended for European Union parliamentary aides to instead pay staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc’s regulations. The National Rally was called the National Front at the time.
Prosecutors asked the court to declare Le Pen guilty and impose a €300,000 fine and three more years of suspended prison sentence. They requested that the period of ineligibility be declared effective immediately, independent of whether Le Pen files an appeal or not.
No emotion from far-right leader
The nine-week trial is scheduled to finish on 27 November, with a verdict at a later date. Defence lawyers are to speak in the next couple of weeks.
Le Pen did not show any emotion in the courtroom as she listened to the prosecutors’ demands.
“It’s no surprise,” she told reporters. “I note that the prosecutors’ claims are extremely outrageous.”
Le Pen said she felt prosecutors were “only interested” in preventing her from running for president in 2027. “I understood that well,” she said.
Le Pen was runner-up to President Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, and her party’s electoral support has grown in recent years.
Prosecutors also requested a guilty verdict for all other co-defendants, including various sentences of up to one year in prison and a 2-million euro fine for the party.
Le Pen has denied accusations she was at the head of “a system” meant to siphon off EU parliament money to the benefit of her party, which she led from 2011 to 2021.
Speaking in court last week, she instead argued the missions of the aides were to be adapted to the MEPs’ various activities, including some highly political missions related to the party.
Parliamentary aide “is a status,” she said. “It says nothing about the job, nothing about the work required, from the secretary to the speechwriter, from the lawyer to the graphic designer, from the bodyguard to the MEP’s office employee.”
Le Pen’s co-defendants — most of whom owe her their political or professional career — testified under her close watch.
Some of the aides provided embarrassed and confused explanations, faced with the lack of evidence their work was in relation with the EU parliament.
Le Pen insisted the party “never had the slightest remonstrance from the Parliament” until a 2015 alert raised by Martin Schulz, then-president of the European body, to French authorities about possible fraudulent use of EU funds by members of the National Front.
“Let’s go back in time. The rules either didn’t exist or were much more flexible,” she said.
Le Pen feared the court would draw wrong conclusions from the party’s ordinary practices she said were legitimate. “It’s unfair,” she repeated. “When one is convinced that tomato means cocaine, the whole grocery list becomes suspicious!”
The president of the court, Bénédicte de Perthuis, said no matter what political issues may be at stake, the court was to stick to a legal reasoning.
“In the end, the only question that matters … is to determine, based on the body of evidence, whether parliamentary aides worked for the MEP they were attached to or for the National Rally,” de Perthuis said.
Patrick Maisonneuve, lawyer for the European Parliament, said the cost of the suspected embezzlement is estimated to €4.5 million. “In the past few weeks, it has appeared very clearly that the fraud is, I think, largely established,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
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