François Bayrou opposed to the provisional execution of Marine Le Pen's possible ineligibility sentence

After Gérald Darmanin and Édouard Philippe, it is the turn of François Bayrou to display a reserve with the severity of the prosecution's requisitions in the trial of the parliamentary assistants of the National Front (formerly National Rally) MEPs. At the center of all attention: the five-year ineligibility sentence with provisional execution, demanded by the prosecution against Marine Le Pen.

If this request was followed by the magistrates next year, the member for Pas-de-Calais could be deprived of a new candidacy for the supreme office in 2027. While the former Minister of the Interior had estimated that the leader of the nationalist deputies was to be “fought at the ballot box, not elsewhere”the president of Modem, acquitted in February in an affair similar to that affecting the RN, became the champion of democratic principles.

Guest on BFMTV on Sunday evening, François Bayrou judged that the provisional execution “would be a problem”. “In a democracy, we must be able to appeal all decisions”insisted the centrist, who recalls that “several elected” MoDem were sanctioned in this way at the start of the year. Claiming to have “fought the National Front without any interruption in all elections and all debates”the mayor of Pau then thinks that an impediment of Marine Le Pen between now and the presidential election would lead certain citizens to “consider that there is something that biases democratic life”.

Bayrou “doesn’t like” injustice

On the judicial level, François Bayrou also expressed “with caution” a form of support for the RN, whose ancestor is accused of having made his European parliamentary assistants work for internal party missions. “Everyone in this case is a prisoner of words. We allowed ourselves to be led to put completely different realities under the same terms, and we did not know how to say it”stormed the three-time presidential candidate.

And to continue his reasoning: “We say “embezzlement of public funds” and everyone thinks of public action. This is not true: the funds in question are not public action funds. These are funds whose aim is exclusively to support parliamentarians.” Either “the political parties to which they belong”. Certainly, François Bayrou does not share the “ideas» of the RN. But, he assumes: “I don’t like injustice, even when it is done to my adversaries.”

According to him, a parliamentarian “is elected by his political party, because he bears the label of his political party, and can only be re-elected because his party will support him”. Before drawing the parallel between MoDem and ex-FN elected officials, “minority parliamentarians” for whom “the only support is the political party to which one belongs”. Enough to more or less join the argument of the president of the RN Jordan Bardella, who evokes a simple “administrative disagreement” between his movement and the European Parliament on the use of funds.