Marine Le Pen, who led France’s right-wing National Rally (RN) party for a decade, goes on trial in Paris on Monday, along with 26 others, accused of misappropriating European Union funds.
Le Pen, who handed over leadership of the RN in 2022 to Jordan Bardella, is accused of charges in her role as party leader and also as a member of the European Parliament, as she was between 2004 and 2017.
The criminal investigation began a decade ago and many of the charges date back long before her first run for the French presidency, in 2012.
Le Pen, 56, denies all the charges, some of which are related to allegedly creating fictional assistants who were paid from EU funds.
Prosecutors say one of the defendants, Thierry Legier, drew a salary as a parliamentary assistant between 2005 and 2012 when his actual role was as a bodyguard for Le Pen and her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the National Front, which later changed its name to National Rally.
Members of the European Parliament are given money by the European Union to cover expenses and salaries for assistants, but that money is not intended for party political activities.
Bardella, 29, who was a member of the European Parliament between 2017 and 2021 and before that worked as a parliamentary assistant, is not on trial, and nor is Jean-Marie Le Pen, who is now 96 and in poor health.
Verdicts Due In November
Verdicts are not expected until the end of November.The allegations against Marine Le Pen—who sits in the French National Assembly representing a constituency in the Pas-de-Calais—have hung over her for years, and she has stated she sees the trial as a chance to clear her name.
Le Pen has said previously, “Parliamentary assistants do not work for the Parliament. They are political assistants to elected officials, political by definition.”
“You ask me if I can define the tasks I assigned to my assistants. It depends on each person’s skills. Some wrote speeches for me, and some handled logistics and coordination,” she added.
RN spokesman Laurent Jacobelli said last week, “She knows that what we are accused of is having a different understanding, as a French party, of what an assistant role is, compared with the European Parliament’s understanding.”
Alexandre Varault, another RN spokesman, said Le Pen would attend the first day of the trial.
Le Pen has lost twice to Emmanuel Macron in French presidential elections, in 2017 and 2022, and is expected to be the RN candidate in 2027. But that could be in jeopardy if she is convicted.
The Paris public prosecutor’s office first began investigating the alleged crimes in 2016, following report the previous year by Martin Schulz, the then-president of the European Parliament, to the French justice minister.
Investigators assessed the role of 49 RN parliamentary assistants since 2009.
Jean-Marie Le Pen Unwell
But earlier this year Le Pen’s father—who founded the National Front in 1972—was ruled unfit for trial.Jean-Marie Le Pen has previously denied wrongdoing and is on record as having said, “I did not choose which assistants were assigned to me. That was decided by Marine Le Pen and others. I only signed the contracts.”
The RN is also being investigated, separately, for alleged illegal financing of Le Pen’s 2022 presidential campaign. That investigation was only launched by the Paris prosecutor’s office in July.
Although Le Pen and her co-defendants have denied the criminal charges, the RN has paid back 1 million euros ($1.12 million) to the European Parliament, according to the parliament’s lawyer Patrick Maisonneuve.
He said 330,000 euros ($369,000) of that sum were directly linked to Marine Le Pen’s alleged misuse of funds.
The National Front, as it was then, won a record 24 seats in the European Parliament in the 2014 elections, resulting in a substantial financial windfall for the party, which prosecutors say faced severe financial problems at the time.
The RN took out a six million euro ($6.72 million) loan from a Russian bank in 2014.
