The end of a trial that could slow down Marine Le Pen's presidential ambitions

Photo: Alain Jocard Agence France-Presse Marine Le Pen fears that the Court will draw erroneous conclusions from the party's practices, which it considers legitimate.

Sylvie Corbet – Associated Press in Paris

Published on November 27

• Europe

Marine Le Pen’s trial ended with a major question: whether the leading figure of the French far right will be able to run in the next presidential election?

The defense lawyer spoke for the last time Wednesday at the trial of Marine Le Pen, accused of embezzling funds from the European Parliament. Rodolphe Bosselut announced that his client was pleading not guilty.

The Paris court has requested a two-year prison sentence. It is expected to deliver its verdict next spring. If it finds her guilty, it could disqualify Le Pen from holding any public office. That could cast doubt on her political future and upend the race to succeed Emmanuel Macron in 2027.

The National Rally and 25 of its leaders, including Le Pen, are accused of using funds intended for European Union parliamentary assistants to pay staffers who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of European Union rules. The National Rally was then called the National Front.

Prosecutors asked the court to convict Le Pen and impose a fine of 300,000 euros (about CA$445,000) and an additional three years of suspended prison time. They demanded that the ineligibility period take effect immediately, whether or not Le Pen appeals.

Mr Bosselut said he was seeking to convince the court that his client’s actions “were ordinary, banal, practiced by all similar European opposition parties […] and without fraudulent intent, precisely because they were considered accepted and not prohibited.”

He also said the prosecutors’ requests were like “a weapon of mass destruction of the democratic game,” adding that a decision banning Ms Le Pen from running in the elections would have “irremediable and irreparable consequences.”

During the trial, Marine Le Pen said she felt prosecutors were only trying to prevent her from running in the 2027 presidential election. She came in second to President Emmanuel Macron in the last two elections, in 2017 and 2022, and her party’s electoral support has grown in recent years.

Prosecutors also sought guilty verdicts for all other co-defendants, including various sentences of up to a year in prison and a €2 million fine for the party.

Prosecutor Louise Neyton said the judicial investigation had shown that the alleged fraudulent acts “are unprecedented in their scale, duration, and organized, optimized and systemic nature.” She stated that “the facts have caused serious and lasting damage to the rules of the European, but especially French, democratic game and to the transparency of public life.”

“It's unfair”

Marine Le Pen has denied accusations that she ran a “system” to divert money from the European Parliament to benefit her party, which she led from 2011 to 2021.

She has instead argued that assistants’ duties should be tailored to the various activities of MEPs, including some highly political missions linked to the party.

Being a parliamentary assistant “is a status,” she said. “It says nothing about the job, nothing about the work required, from secretary to speechwriter, from lawyer to graphic designer, from bodyguard to MEP’s office worker.”

Le Pen insisted that her party had “never had a single reprimand from Parliament” until Martin Schulz, then president of the European body, alerted French authorities in 2015 about possible fraudulent use of European Union funds by members of the National Front. “Let’s go back in time. The rules didn’t exist or were much more flexible,” she said.

Le Pen fears that the court will draw the wrong conclusions from the party’s practices, which it considers legitimate. “It’s unfair. When you’re convinced that tomato means cocaine, the whole shopping list becomes suspect!” ” she said.

The presiding judge, Bénédicte de Perthuis, said that whatever the political issues at stake, the court had to stick to legal reasoning.

“Ultimately, the only question that matters […] is to determine, based on all the evidence, whether the parliamentary assistants worked for the MEP to whom they were attached or for the National Rally,” she said.

Read also

• Marine Le Pen threatened with ineligibility, the French far right appeals to public opinion
• Marine Le Pen denies any wrongdoing at the start of her trial