The trial of Marine Le Pen, 24 other people and the National Rally, suspected of having embezzled funds from the European Parliament to pay party employees, opens Monday before the Paris criminal court, a case with serious political stakes for the leader of the far right.
Nine former MEPs from the National Front (renamed RN) will appear, including Marine Le Pen, Louis Aliot, now vice-president of the RN, the former number 2 of the party Bruno Gollnisch, and the deputy and spokesperson for the RN Julien Odoul.
Alongside them, 12 people who were their parliamentary assistants and four party collaborators will also be tried in this trial scheduled for three half-days a week until November 27.
The leader of the RN has indicated that she intends to appear as much as possible in front of the judges, but on Tuesday, she could favor the general policy declaration of the new Prime Minister Michel Barnier to the National Assembly.
– “New elements” –
“Marine Le Pen has chosen to be very present in this trial. Some say ‘she’s going to hide, she won’t come’. No, not at all. That’s not the style of the house,” assured Sunday on RTL the RN deputy Sébastien Chenu, promising that Ms. Le Pen would put forward “a certain number of new elements”.
The case began in 2015 with a report from the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz and concerns numerous parliamentary attaché contracts over a period of more than ten years (2004-2016).
For the prosecution, these “assistants”, struggling to describe their tasks, only had the title. Some had never even met their official employer or set foot in Parliament and, according to the prosecution, only worked for the party – which is prohibited under European regulations.
These include the historic bodyguard of FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, Thierry Légier, his secretary, Marine Le Pen’s chief of staff, Catherine Griset, and even the party’s graphic designer…
“Marine, would it be possible for me to come to Strasbourg tomorrow to see how a session is going” in Parliament, “and to meet Mylène Troszczynski to whom I am attached?”, wrote Julien Odoul in February 2015, four months after the start of his contract as a parliamentary assistant to Ms. Troszczynski. “Yes of course,” replied Marine Le Pen.
The defendants, tried in particular for embezzlement of public funds or complicity in this crime, face a maximum of ten years of imprisonment and a fine of one million euros and above all a ten-year ineligibility sentence likely to hamper the ambitions presidential elections of Marine Le Pen for 2027.
“But there is no reason for her to be declared ineligible since François Bayrou, prosecuted for the same facts, also president of a political party, was acquitted. So what is valid for one should be valid for other”, wants to believe Mr. Chenu.
Most of the defendants contest as a whole, citing a “mutualization” of the work of parliamentary assistants. The RN has been denouncing for years “relentlessness”, even a “political” procedure.
– “System ?” –
“We have nothing to reproach ourselves for in this affair,” Marine Le Pen, 56, declared in Le Parisien in mid-September, saying she wanted to explain at the bar that parliamentary assistants are “not employees of the European Parliament” and have “obviously a vocation, for a certain number of them, to engage in politics”.
“It is not a political trial because the judges do not play politics, but it is a political settling of scores by the majority of the European Parliament”, agrees with AFP Me Alexandre Varaut, lawyer and MEP RN .
The European Parliament, civil party, estimated its financial damage at three million euros. He will only claim two million, one million having already been reimbursed (which is not an admission of guilt, assured the RN).
The Paris prosecutor’s office mentioned in September 2023 “a real system put in place to have the European Parliament bear part of the operating costs of the FN by covering the salaries of a growing number of its employees”.
This “system”, validated by Jean-Marie Le Pen then his daughter, according to the prosecution, would have accelerated with the entry into Parliament in 2014 of 23 FN MEPs (compared to three previously).
Jean-Marie Le Pen, 96 years old, will not appear, an expertise having determined that he was not “in condition” to be judged for health reasons, like former MEP Jean-François Jalkh.
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