EDITORIAL. The National Rally caught up, like the others, by business!

Marine Le Pen, her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, the RN and the party leadership of the 2010s, suspected of embezzlement of European funds, will be judged from September 30.

Marine Le Pen therefore has a meeting with the courts next fall. She will be tried for two months from September 30 for embezzlement of public funds. The leader of the far right is accused of having embezzled nearly seven million euros between 2009 and 2016, to finance her political party with European taxpayers’ money. The magistrates suspect her of having set up “in a concerted and deliberate manner” a fraudulent system to pay employees of his party with funds allocated by the European Parliament to each MP to pay their assistants. On the dock, Marine Le Pen, who denies the facts, will find the entire party staff, but also her father, Jean-Marie, if he is physically fit to appear, or even her ex-companion and mayor of Perpignan Louis Aliot. In total, 27 defendants for a large-scale scam!

The RN no longer makes the fight against corruption a hobby horse

Marine Le Pen is not the first party leader to be tried for similar facts. François Bayrou was recently convicted and cleared at first instance. The total damage was 25 times less significant, 293,000 euros compared to 6.8 million for the RN, and the involvement of the boss of the MoDem, who was not a European deputy, has not been demonstrated. An ongoing investigation targets France Insoumise. And this is how we measure the real transformation of the extreme right. In the past, Jean-Marie Le Pen brandished the slogan “Heads up, hands clean” and he treated his adversaries as “rough parties”. From now on, the RN is a “ripou” party like the others, if I dare say so. We sometimes wonder about the success of the famous “de-demonization”. Business is an area where the normalization, the trivialization of the extreme right is running at full speed. As the Lepénist elected officials gained responsibilities, they collected the pots with the condemnations rained down. As a result, the RN no longer makes the fight against corruption a hobby horse. And Marine Le Pen is very lenient with her adversaries caught up in business, like François Fillon in 2017.

The voters, for the moment, do not hold it against him. In fact, Marine Le Pen’s first fear would be to receive, at the end of the trial this fall, a heavy sentence of ineligibility which threatens her fourth presidential candidacy in 2027. To the point that within of the RN, some are already speculating on his possible replacement by Jordan Bardella who is not weighed down, neither by business, nor by the Le Pen name.