Nearly ten years have passed since the investigation started, and the walls are now beginning to close. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally Party, and two dozen other members of the party are accused of embezzling European Union funds by allegedly using millions of euros intended for EU parliamentary assistants to pay their own party staffers in France. In accordance with a 2016 statute that automatically bars lawmakers convicted of embezzlement from holding public office for five years, Parisian prosecutors told the court this week that they were attempting to ban all of the defendants from holding public office. Crucially, even if the defense files an appeal, the prohibition would still stand. The party would be fined €2 million, while Le Pen herself may be fined €300,000 and imprisoned for up to five years.
The grounds for a presidential ban
The party disputes this as an admission of guilt. The RN insists that the personnel were lawfully hired as parliamentary assistants and have already paid back over €1 million to the EU parliament. The trial is scheduled to end on November 27. The ban would be terrible for Le Pen, who has already faced center-right President Emmanuel Macron twice in second-round presidential elections. However, Le Pen, who has spent decades trying to lift the far-right party out of the shadow of her father, Jean-Marie, who denied the Holocaust, is no longer the lone candidate for the position. Le Pen has been cultivating Jordan Bardella, the party president, as her “lion cub” for years. Bardella was only 28 years old when he stood as the RN’s prime ministerial candidate earlier this year. Few people would feel comfortable writing their memoirs before they turn thirty, but Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s carefully chosen protégé, clearly thought he had a lot to write. After joining the RN at the age of 16, Bardella was elected to the European Parliament in 2019 at the age of 23, and three years later, Le Pen personally gave him the party presidency. He entered the snap legislative elections this year as the prime ministerial candidate for the far-right party.
Political ramifications of a dual outcome
The RN currently possesses more National Assembly seats than at any other time in the party’s history and is the largest single party in the lower house, although the party was unable to overcome the block once more constructed by liberal and left-wing voters determined to thwart the far right’s ascent to power. Bardella was still feeling great at the book launch earlier this week of What I’m Looking For, which was published by a company owned by Vincent Bolloré, a right-wing billionaire. According to Fred Paxton, a political scientist at the University of Glasgow and the author of Restrained Radicals: Populist Radical Right Parties in Local Government, Bardella’s hardline anti-immigration program was essentially the same, despite stylistic differences with his longtime mentor Le Pen. However, he claimed that the RN’s heir-apparent had succeeded in portraying himself as the more palatable face of a party that has long battled to disassociate itself from its overtly anti-Semitic founders and longstanding ties to neo-Nazi organizations.
Public reaction and support base dynamics
Bardella would be entering the presidential race with a compelling narrative to sell to a populace that is becoming less and less trusting of established institutions in addition to his apparent appeal to younger voters. He would no longer be the party’s hand-picked poster boy, but rather the standard-bearer of a popular leader barred from holding public office by an anti-democratic judiciary working for distant European bureaucrats. The story is already underway. Bardella categorically denied the prosecutors’ demands in an interview with the Bolloré-owned CNN channel on Thursday. “By disqualifying Marine Le Pen and financially dismantling the Rassemblement National, the courts are attempting to succeed where the political class has failed,” he stated. The party was already using the case to strengthen its anti-establishment credentials, according to Tristan Boursier, an associate researcher at Sciences Po University’s political research center. Indeed, as the recent election of US President-elect Donald Trump has made abundantly evident, criminal convictions have not proven to be a barrier to achieving high office. Paxton stated that Bardella might be in a good position to take advantage of France’s growing anti-system attitude, but he advised against making direct comparisons between the French race and the US presidential election.
