The extract was widely shared on the evening of Wednesday, November 13, after Marine Le Pen’s indignant reaction to the prosecution’s requisitions in the trial of the European parliamentary assistants of the National Front (FN, which became National Rally, RN, in 2018). We see the far-right leader, twenty years younger, facing Jean-François Copé, then spokesperson for the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin. The context: a few weeks before the 2004 regional elections, Alain Juppé, potential presidential candidate, has just been sentenced to ten years of ineligibility – the sentence will be reduced to one year on appeal – in the fictitious jobs affair of the City of Paris.
Marine Le Pen then finds that too little attention is paid to these cases of embezzlement and deplores that Mr. Juppé is not abandoning political life. “The French are not tired of hearing about business, they are tired of there being business!, she gets annoyed on the set of the show “Crosswords”. They are tired of seeing elected officials embezzling money, it’s scandalous. (…) Respecting democracy means not stealing French money. » Following the old Lepenist slogan “Heads up, hands clean”, Marine Le Pen was then an ardent defender of the moralization of French political life, a fight that she continued… until she herself was threatened by the law.
Thus, at the beginning of the 2010s, when Nicolas Sarkozy and his supporters were surrounded by business and local socialist elected officials were convicted of embezzlement – an offense now accused of the three-time presidential candidate – the secretary general of the FN, Steeve Briois, and its president, Marine Le Pen, are quick to demand “clean hands operation” and immediate resignation – concerning the socialist deputy for Bouches-du-Rhône Sylvie Andrieux.
The wind is turning
“The weapon of ineligibility must be used with much more rigor”wrote Marine Le Pen, in 2012, in her second and last book, So that France lives (ed. Jacques Grancher), in a chapter aimed at “restore public morality”. Two years later, after the indictment of Thomas Thévenoud, François Hollande’s short-lived Secretary of State accused of not paying his taxes, Steeve Briois underlines, in an editorial published on the FN website: “Public morality has always been one of our main battles. Intransigence in this area is the sine qua non condition for renewing the bond of trust which must unite a people and those they have mandated to direct their destiny. »
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