In the first editorial of his show Facing Bock-Côtébroadcast last Saturday on the French channel CNews, the columnist spoke about the desire of the “system” to “decapitate the opposition” by prosecuting Marine Le Pen and several other members of her party for embezzlement of funds public. In doing so, he has traced a history of the “demonization” of the National Front, but it omits certain aspects of the history of the far-right party.
Mathieu Bock-Côté begins his history of what he describes as an attempt to exclude the “national camp” from French political life with a seemingly innocuous sentence, but which says a lot.
“Let us return to the emergence, not the creationbut the emergence of the FN [Front National, devenu le Rassemblement National] in the early 1980s,” he said.
Why distinguish the “emergence” from the “creation” of the FN?
A possible explanation is that this allows us not to mention that the National Front was founded, in 1972, on the initiative of a small fascist group, New Order, which sought to clean up its image and participate in the elections.
Among the founding members, we find Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of Marine. We also find neo-Nazis like François Duprat and former soldiers of the Waffen-SS – the military branch of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party – like Pierre Bousquet and Léon Gaultier. The latter two were members of the Charlemagne Division, a unit composed mainly of French volunteers who had enlisted to fight for Hitler.
At the origin of the FN we also find those nostalgic for French colonialism, such as Roger Holeign, a former member of the Organization of the Secret Army (OAS), a terrorist organization which campaigns against the independence of Algeria.
Jean-Marie Le Pen took control of the party a year later. The New Order group, which was dissolved by the government in 1973, was pushed out and its leaders founded another party called the New Forces Party.
The National Front’s first real electoral successes came in the 1984 European elections. The party then obtained nearly 11% of the vote. The FN entered the National Assembly in 1986 by electing 35 deputies.
In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election. However, he only obtained 18% of the votes, a front having been formed to block the far right.
This distinction between the creation and the electoral successes of the National Front then allows Mathieu Bock-Côté to assert that “demonization begins from this moment”, that is to say from the electoral emergence of the party in the 1980s “The demonization of the FN predates the declarations and historical excesses of Jean-Marie Le Pen. The demonization of the FN predates the words we used to justify its demonization,” insists Bock-Côté.
These famous “outrageous” remarks were made in 1987, on French television. Jean-Marie Le Pen was questioned about the theses of two Holocaust deniers refuting the existence of gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps. He replied that he had not studied the question and that it was “a point of detail in the history of the Second World War”. This casual statement about the horrors of the Holocaust followed him for a long time.
“Decapitation of the opposition” or end of a fraud scheme?
For Mathieu Bock-Côté, the current legal problems of the party now renamed National Rally are a continuation of this “demonization” effort.
“We must decapitate the opposition, we must destroy its leader, we must ruin the party. In what way? By manipulating, by reinterpreting the rules of the European Parliament to evacuate once and for all the main figure, Marine Le Pen,” analyzes the columnist.
The National Rally and its leader Marine Le Pen are in hot water. After nine years of investigation, a trial began in September 2024. Marine Le Pen is accused of being at the “center” of an “organized system” of embezzlement of public funds. According to the lawsuit, the party used a fictitious employment scheme to finance itself from the budget of the European Parliament.
The trial is scheduled to run until November 27 and a decision is expected in early 2025.
The saga began in 2014 when the European Parliament received an anonymous email denouncing alleged fictitious jobs and “possible fraud”. The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) opens an investigation and finds that Marine Le Pen’s chief of staff spent only twelve hours in the European Parliament during the ten months she was supposed to be a parliamentary assistant. The job of Marine Le Pen’s bodyguard as a parliamentary assistant has also been described as fictitious. However, these jobs are financed with public funds from the European Union.
This story has grown over the years. The Central Office for the Fight against Corruption and Financial and Tax Offenses is conducting an investigation and carrying out searches at the party accountant’s office and at the FN headquarters.
There are currently 27 leaders and employees of the National Rally who are indicted. Marine Le Pen is accused of embezzlement of public funds. The far-right party is accused of using the European Parliament as a cash cow to finance its political activities, which is illegal.
The prosecution estimates that between 2004 and 2016, €6.8 million ($10.1 million) was embezzled using this fictitious employment system.
Mathieu Bock-Côté accuses the European Parliament of “reinterpreting the rules”. Marine Le Pen also says she has done nothing illegal and that parliamentary assistants have the right to campaign in their party.
The rules governing the work of these assistants date from 2004. Parliamentary assistants must help MEPs to carry out their work, but cannot participate in the national political activities of the parties. The rules were tightened in 2009 to specify that “only the costs corresponding to the assistance necessary and directly linked to the exercise of the parliamentary mandate of the deputies must be covered”.
Last week, the prosecution announced that it was demanding five years in prison, including two prison terms, and five years of ineligibility against Marine Le Pen. He also adds that this ineligibility must be applied immediately, and not at the end of possible appeals. This means that Marine Le Pen would not be able to run in the next presidential elections in 2027.
Marine Le Pen defends herself by asserting that it is a political trial aimed at denying her power. The host of Facing Bock-CôtéEliot Deval, and the Quebec columnist use Le Pen’s terms when speaking of “political killing”.
Mathieu Bock-Côté says he is worried about the superiority of law over political power, a common theme of the French far right, which believes that the justice system as well as respect for the laws, even the constitution, hinder the will popular. Bock-Côté judges that “the offensive weapon of the oligarchy is the rule of law”, affirming that this oligarchy “will destroy you politically in the name of the rule of law – and then we redistribute the places delivered from the adversary who has been rising for too long.
“The other scenario, obviously, is a popular revolt. […] We must never underestimate that the people, by being trampled on, can revolt,” continues Bock-Côté.
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