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“Everyone has stolen from the cash register except the National Front!” exclaimed Marine Le Pen on French TV in 2004, commenting on an embezzlement scandal unfolding in Paris’s city council. At the time she had yet to become the leader of her father’s far-right party or to run three times for president. “French people are fed up with elected officials who embezzle public money.”
Flash forward 20 years and Le Pen – along with 24 other National Rally (RN) party officials, employees, former EU lawmakers and parliamentary assistants – stands accused of having embezzled more than €4m from the European parliament. She furiously denies any wrongdoing. The case centres on an alleged fake job scheme – she and the others are accused of using EU funds to pay staff in France who were working for the party.
On 14 November, the Paris prosecutor requested a five-year prison sentence and a five-year ban from public office for Le Pen. This has only emboldened her to proclaim that she is the target of a “political trial” aimed at preventing her from running for the French presidency in 2027. The ban from public office has a “provisional execution”, meaning that if Le Pen is found guilty, the ban would take immediate effect even if she appealed. “The law applies to all,” the Paris prosecutor told the court; the law in question is a 2016 bill, passed after similar embezzlement scandals, that requires a public office ban for this type of offence. The trial runs until 27 November and a verdict is expected early next year.
The scope of the RN’s alleged fake job scheme is remarkable: from 2004 to 2016, the prosecutors said, the party remunerated high-ranking officials via funds allocated to its MEPs to hire assistants. They claim the officials were listed as parliamentary assistants but worked exclusively for the party outside parliament. In 2014, the National Rally was still called the National Front and, with €9.4m worth of debt, was close to bankruptcy. It was also the year its MEP ranks jumped from three to 24, making a large trove of funds available to the party.
According to the Paris prosecutor: “Everything went by her, everything leads to Marine Le Pen: she centralised, arbitrated, decided.” Le Pen has responded by saying she has “absolutely no sense of having committed the slightest irregularity, or the slightest illegal act”. As for the substance of the allegations, the RN has said: “The prosecutor seems to question the party’s perfectly legitimate ways of practising politics, as if an MEP was not allowed to ask their assistants to work with other members of their party.”
As soon as the public office ban was requested, Le Pen rushed to journalists outside the courtroom to complain about the French judicial system and its “aim to deprive the French people of their right to vote for whom they wish”. On primetime TV the next day, she denounced a “revolting, outrageous indictment” and likened it to a “political death penalty” requested against her. She has launched a petition calling on her supporters to “defend democracy”, and claiming that prosecutors want “to discredit her party and suppress the voice of millions of her voters”.
Does this populist, anti-judiciary manoeuvring remind you of anyone? Le Pen chose not to show her support for Donald Trump in his presidential campaign this year – she appears to have cooled off the idea of the president-elect, with his “America-first” priorities – but her defence strategy is straight out of the Trump playbook.
And just like with Trump, it has its dutiful amplifiers. The hard-right TV channel CNews, France’s very own Fox News, has aired one denunciation after the next of this “political trial” against Le Pen. And although this is only to be expected from all the news outlets of conservative media magnate Vincent Bolloré, the “political trial” tune is trickling down to other media too. There has been much media focus on the seemingly shocking prospect of Le Pen being banned from running for the presidency and less on the trial itself, which brought to light highly detailed allegations of a long-running and systemic misappropriation of public funds.
Yet just as January 6 did not stop Trump from being able to move back into the White House, Le Pen’s strategy may well work in her favour. The longer her claims of a political trial get airtime without proper contextualisation, the more likely the French public may think there is some truth to it – it chimes with the widespread anti-elite sentiment among French voters. After all, as of September, Le Pen was the French people’s first choice in polling for the 2027 presidential election. Macron’s approval ratings are currently abysmal, and the left is trailing not far behind him.
If she is banned from public office, Le Pen’s career will suffer, but her party’s rise may not: the RN’s president, Jordan Bardella, who has not been charged, is already being propped up as her potential stand-in. Le Pen, meanwhile, has more than two months to sing her cover of Trump’s “They’re out to get me” song on every TV channel. Only time will tell how catchy the tune is.
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Pauline Bock is a French journalist based in Paris
