Marine Le Pen, trial begins for embezzlement of European Parliament funds

Brussels – A trial involving 27 politicians from the transalpine far-right for alleged misappropriation of European funds begins today (Sept. 30) and will last at least two months. Marine Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie, are among the top names called to account for a staggering shortfall: €6.8 million put by the EU Parliament and ended up, prosecutors say, in the Rassemblement National (RN) coffers.

The judicial affair that has seen the European Parliament set itself up as a civil plaintiff and accuse the party of the Le Pen lineage is by no means new: it dates back to 2015 when the first investigations were launched into whether funds disbursed between 2004 and 2016 by Strasbourg to the RN (which at the time was called the Front National) had been used for national rather than European purposes. The alleged violations, formalized in 2016 by the Prosecutor’s Office in Paris, ranged from the wrongful appropriation of public funds to complicity and concealment. In 2018, Marine Le Pen was condemned to compensate the EU Parliament for almost €300,000 for a matter concerning her parliamentary assistant.

Today, some of the most prominent members of the current and past leadership of the RN have ended up under indictment: Marine Le Pen, the historic leader of the French radical right, and her father Jean-Marie, the party’s controversial founder, for starters. But also Nicolas Bay, former secretary general of the FN and a multiple-time MEP, who was re-elected in Strasbourg last June with Reconquête (the party of Éric Zemmour, who considers himself to be more “hard and pure” than the Lepenists) and now a defector as well, and Louis Aliot, Le Pen’s former comrade and the first mayor in the RN quota in a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants (in Perpignan, in the Western Pyrenees department).

Should the trial result in a final conviction, it would be a blow to the French far-right leader who has her sights set on the 2027 run for the Elysée Palace—for which, at the moment, polls have her ahead of other possible candidates, including the current president of the République Emmanuel Macron. In addition to incarceration of up to ten years and fines of up to €million, the penalties imposed could, in fact, also include suspension of civil rights for a period of five years, which would make anyone subjected to it ineligible and shatter Le Pen’s dreams of becoming the first woman in the role of head of state in transalpine history.