Marine Le Pen, chief lawyer

You only need to listen to Marine Le Pen for a few minutes at the helm of the Paris Criminal Court to understand why she embodies the FN (now RN, now chaired by Jordan Bardella): more at ease, more impactful, more eloquent than all her co-defendants in the so-called parliamentary assistants affair, she delivers a brilliant performance. In terms of form, anyway.

When others skate, mutter, sometimes embroider to the point of absurdity, she refutes, dodges, castigates. She appears, one week before the indictment, as the only one to understand the extent of the threat of conviction, and is already thinking about its possible aftermath. She was a lawyer: this can be seen in her art of making the holes in the file speak to make people forget the documents that embarrass her. She is political: this can be seen in the way she rehearses her arguments with journalists during a recess before her “grand oral” which lasted from Tuesday to Wednesday. If he…