The parliamentary commission of inquiry, launched in May at the initiative of the RN group in the National Assembly, was to put an end to the accusations making the far-right party an agent of Russian influence in France. This is at least what Marine Le Pen hoped for, as she obviously failed to convince her fellow MPs: in fact, the conclusions of the report only drive the point home. The National Front, which has become the National Rally, is thus accused of having been a “transmission belt” of Moscow, according to the first conclusions of the commission of inquiry into foreign interference, parliamentary sources told AFP.
Excerpts from the report, written by Renaissance MP Constance Le Grip, leaked this Thursday, June 1 on RMC And Mediapart. She insists on the “alignment” of the FN with the “Russian discourse” at the time of the “illegal annexation” of Crimea in 2014, the year during which the party took out a loan from a Czech bank. Russian.
Lepenist elected officials, including committee chairman Jean-Philippe Tanguy, voted against the report, adopted by 11 votes to five, according to a parliamentary source.
LFI abstained. The report shows “at least a guilty casualness” of the RN with regard to Russia, but it is not “exhaustive” on the influence of other states in France, estimated the Insoumis Aurélien Saintoul.
A “dishonest report” for Le Pen
During a press conference in Pas-de-Calais, Marine Le Pen brushed aside the conclusions, which she compared to “a political trial”. “There is nothing, in fact”, she continued, considering that the report was “in the image of the rapporteur, that is to say sectarian, dishonest and completely politicized” .
The far-right leader was auditioned last week by this commission. Under oath, she had challenged any political counterpart in exchange for the Russian loan contracted by the former National Front, while she had refused to condemn the annexation of Crimea by Russia a few months later.
“I formally deny having made any decision whatsoever to please anyone”, she explained, arguing that “the arrival or not of a loan has not changed one iota the opinions which were ours forever”. On the merits, “I considered that freely, the inhabitants of Crimea had expressed themselves by voting to be attached to Russia”, had dropped the president of the RN deputies.
On Thursday, she felt that her political opponents “reproach (the RN) for thinking differently” from them, saying that “the report barely speaks of the loan on which the whole campaign of defamation and slander has yet been built, because that all the authorities who were questioned indicated that there was nothing”.
After the leak of extracts from the report, EELV deputy Julien Bayou spoke of “a fiasco” which “comes back into the teeth” of the RN. “The commission overwhelms the Le Pen clan: it is only justice for these patriots of the living room, accomplices of the enemies of the Republic”, for its part commented on Twitter his Renaissance colleague Sacha Houlié.