There are days when bad news piles up. Rachida Dati experienced it this Tuesday, July 2, between legal setbacks that are confirmed and the political disavowal of a part of the presidential majority against her.
The Minister of Culture first suffered a major setback in court. The Paris Court of Appeal rejected her request to have the statute of limitations recognized and therefore to end the corruption proceedings against her in one part of the Ghosn affair. The investigating chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal “did not grant Rachida Dati’s request” on Tuesday, two of her lawyers, Olivier Pardo and Olivier Bluche, told the press. A judicial source confirmed this decision to AFP.
“The substance is not at all settled. The problem is that time is an insult to memory. It is difficult to understand a case fifteen years after the events,” reacted Olivier Pardo and Olivier Baratelli, another defense lawyer, in a press release, announcing that they would appeal to the Court of Cassation.
Indicted since July 2021
The former Minister of Justice and current mayor of the 7th arrondissement of Paris has been under investigation since July 2021 for corruption and passive influence peddling by a person holding a public elective mandate. In this judicial investigation, opened since 2019, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) must soon submit its requisitions before the investigating judges decide on whether or not to hold a trial before the criminal court against her and the former boss of the Renault-Nissan automobile group.
The threat of a trial “is indeed one of the possibilities but at this stage, the procedure will follow its course with the appeals”, commented Me Bluche. Rachida Dati is suspected of having received 900,000 euros from RNBV, a subsidiary of the Renault-Nissan alliance, without compensation for real work, between 2010 and 2012, when she was a lawyer and MEP (2009-2019). The investigations also sought to determine whether this fee agreement could have been used to mask lobbying activity in the European Parliament, prohibited for all elected officials.
In this case, Carlos Ghosn, who lives in Lebanon, has been the subject of an international arrest warrant since April 2023. The former automobile magnate and the Minister of Culture deny any irregularity. Rachida Dati has filed numerous appeals throughout the proceedings. The investigating chamber had already refused in 2021 to find that the facts alleged were time-barred. It was on the basis of “new, fundamental elements” that Ms. Dati’s lawyers had assured that they had contacted the investigating judges and then the court of appeal, to obtain, in vain, the statute of limitations for the facts.
The bitter resentment of Gilles Le Gendre
On the political front, the Minister of Culture was also taken to task on Tuesday by her own camp. While one of her close candidates on behalf of the presidential camp, Jean Laussucq, qualified in second place in the 2nd constituency of Paris (grouping the 5th arrondissement as well as part of the 6th and 7th arrondissements) with 23.6% of the vote, far behind the socialist candidate Marine Rosset (33.4%), he will not obtain the support of the Renaissance dissident Gilles Le Gendre. The former president of the LREM group in the National Assembly, qualified in third place with 19.6% of the vote, goes even further: while he initially intended to maintain his candidacy, he will ultimately withdraw… explaining that he would vote for the candidate of the New Popular Front.
“The maneuver was therefore successful, consisting of preferring circumstantial supporters, determined prosecutors of his actions since 2017, to Emmanuel Macron’s early support. I draw the consequence by withdrawing my candidacy,” asserts Gilles Le Gendre in a press release. But out of the question for the former journalist to give his support to Jean Laussucq, deputy mayor of the 7th arrondissement with whom he has had a bad relationship for a long time.
“Ms. Dati’s candidate must assume the discredit of the political figure of whom he is the creature and whose recent appointment to the government represented a betrayal of the ideals of political ethics and the promises of renewal of political practices carried by Emmanuel Macron in 2017,” writes the former MP. Thus, he writes that he will put in the ballot box on Sunday “a ballot of the socialist candidate Marine Rosset”, a person whose “attachment to democratic, republican and universalist values I know”, specified Gilles Le Gendre, who had beaten her in the second round for her re-election in 2022.
Support from the Macronist left wing
It is difficult to estimate to what extent this choice could be followed this Sunday by the Macronist voters of the constituency, while the combined lists of Jean Laussucq and Gilles Le Gendre are well ahead of that of the socialist candidate in the first round. But this choice has in any case been welcomed by several figures of the left wing of the former presidential majority, starting with Clément Beaune. The latter, eliminated in the first round in another Parisian constituency, praised on X the “choice of clarity and transparency” of Gilles Le Gendre, who was according to him the “target of sickening maneuvers”. “Dignified and honorable, the values that characterize you my friend. You have all my respect!”, reacted for his part the former president of the law commission Sacha Houlié, also holding a more left-wing line within Macronie.
During the first round campaign, Gilles Le Gendre received the support of several figures in the presidential camp, such as Richard Ferrand, Agnès Buzyn, and the outgoing president of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet.
The Horizons mayor of the 5th arrondissement, Florence Berthout, called on Mr. Le Gendre’s voters to vote for Jean Laussucq, or the “moderate camp against the allies of the far left”. The LR mayor of the 6th arrondissement, Jean-Pierre Lecoq, a supporter of the alliance between his party and Renaissance in view of the 2026 municipal elections, also called for a vote for Jean Laussucq against the “far left coalition”. If Rachida Dati thought she could count on the support of the entire Macronie to become mayor of the capital in two years, a first element of a response was given this Tuesday.