According to leaks, Marine Le Pen's lawyer will plead the same arguments as during the trial. A defense considered catastrophic by observers and the origin of very severe requisitions.
“Political death penalty”, “unbearable political interference in the democratic process”, “what credibility would an elected president have without me being able to present myself?”… In this Sunday’s JDD, Marine Le Pen expressed her same indignation than in recent days in the face of the prosecution's requisitions made on November 13 in the trial of the RN's European parliamentary assistants. That is, tears and still no questioning, in particular of his line of defense as the pleadings of the defendants' lawyers begin this Monday, November 18.
A five-axis defense
And Marine Le Pen intends to persist and sign, on November 27, when her lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, will attack her plea on the last day of the trial while the ex-president of the RN risks 5 years in prison including three years suspended, 300,000 euros. fine and 5 years of ineligibility with provisional execution. According to the JDD, five lines of defense were targeted and they are very similar to what Marine Le Pen developed throughout the trial.
Thus, it will begin with the “unjusticiability” of parliamentary acts but also “the naturally political dimension of the functions of a parliamentary assistant”. What the ex-president of the RN had developed before the judges under the formula: “An assistant, he works for his deputy, and he can work for his deputy for the benefit of his party.” And who made her assistant, Catherine Griset, unable to detail her tasks, say that she worked “for Marine Le Pen, personality”.
However, although it does not specify the list of tasks that the assistant must carry out, the regulations of the European Parliament are very clear: the envelopes allocated by Strasbourg to remunerate the assistants of MEPs cannot finance a contract signed with the party and must correspond to the European activity of the MEP.
Despite everything, the RN's lawyers intend to insist on the notion of “parliamentary assistance” which they consider to be “fuzzy”.
No fictitious job
Another line of defense will be to recall that the parliamentary assistants of RN MEPs worked well, “whether in a shared framework between different deputies or through political collaborations”. For Marine Le Pen's advice, the assistants had a job that was anything but fictitious. However, in their indictment, the prosecutors stressed several times that the assistants were incapable of saying what they were doing as part of their mission to the European Parliament. They thus spoke of “false volunteers paid by the European Parliament”.
Although they worked well, the parliamentary assistants of the RN MEPs had difficulty providing proof that it was good for Parliament. Some even assert their right to silence, like Laurent Salles, the assistant to Louis Aliot, mayor of Perpignan.
Finally, the RN intends to denounce an “arbitrary expansion of jurisprudence” since the party considers that we wish to judge parliamentary assistants and their MEPs on the basis of a regulation which would be subsequent to the alleged facts and which “constitutes a violation of the principle of non-retroactivity of more severe criminal laws”.
A political trial
A line of defense already developed for almost two months in court and considered catastrophic by most observers. And yet, at the hearing, Marine Le Pen had sketched the beginnings of mea culpa. “Yes, I understood today that there is a risk and that a parliamentary assistant cannot have any political function,” she admitted after her interrogation on October 15.
“I absolutely did not have the feeling of having committed the slightest irregularity, the slightest illegality,” she also said when she spoke of the pooling of parliamentary assistants.
Or again, she had admitted to having “left it hanging” to modify the status of Catherine Griset, thus putting herself at fault concerning the compulsory residence in Brussels of her parliamentary assistant.
But, since then, Marine Le Pen has continued to place the debates on the idea of a political trial aimed at eliminating her from the race in the next presidential election of 2027. “A unique line of defense which bordered on ridicule” , ruled the prosecution in its indictment.
It must be said that, for Marine Le Pen, the electoral benefit is much juicier. The president of the court often reframed her on this subject when she was on the stand.
But Marine Le Pen remains on the fixed line of defense even if she admits, somewhat shaken: “I am a mother, an honest woman, dissected for decades, and they demand 300,000 euros from me, I am threatened with prison. “It's a building that collapses on you, especially when you know you're innocent”, as she confided to the JDD again this Sunday.
