Marine Le Pen’s candidacy for the 2027 presidential election is suspended. The president of the far -right party, the national rally, must be fixed on her fate this Monday morning in the case of European parliamentary assistants of the FN (now RN). Twenty-four other people and his party are also targeted. The Paris Criminal Court should start rendering its judgment at 10 a.m. on Monday morning. Marine Le Pen will be present, according to his lawyer Maître Rodolphe Bosselut. What are the challenges of this verdict? L’Express takes stock.
What is Marine Le Pen accused?
The head of the RN deputies is continued for acts of “embezzlement of public funds” and “complicity in embezzlement of public funds”. The accusation criticizes the triple unhappy candidate for the presidential election for having hired, when it was MEP (2004-2017), four fictitious assistants, who would actually have worked for his party, the FN. The assistants paid by the European Parliament would have carried out tasks related to party management rather than a job related to European parliamentary activity.
Among the assistants concerned, and co-accused of Marine Le Pen, include her bodyguard and her chief of staff, Thierry Légier and Catherine Griset. The investigation carried out from 2014 by the European Antifraude Wrestling Office had revealed that Catherine Griset “would have spent only 740 minutes, about twelve hours” in the European Parliament, when she was supposed to be a assistant there, between October 2014 and August 2015. The accusation considers that she mainly occupied her function of cabinet chef of the president at the headquarters of the frontist party, in Nanterre, in the Hauts-de-Seine.
Beyond suspicions of individual fictitious jobs, justice suspects Marine Le Pen for having been at the center of a “System of diversion” organized and centralized money paid by the EU for the benefit of his party, between 2004 and 2016, recalls the newspaper The world. According to the requisitions of prosecutors, the “system” set up for the party in order to “relieve finances” is “unpublished”. Due to its duration (2004 to 2016), its magnitude (4.5 million prejudice estimated), and this “organized” character which “strengthened” when Marine Le Pen took the lead in 2011, and only stopped after a report from the European Parliament.
What does it risk?
At the end of two months of trial (September 30-November 27) and to everyone’s surprise, the accusation had requested against the File Right File Chef a sentence of five years of ineligibility with provisional execution (immediately applying, even in the event of appeal) in addition to five years in prison, two of which are farm (a convertible sentence), as well as 300,000 euros in fine. The penalty of ineligibility was expected because it is compulsory for the embezzlement of public funds, but provisional execution was much less. In addition, a fine of 4.3 million euros, of which 2 million firm was required against the party.
“I think that the will of the prosecution is to deprive the French of the capacity to vote for those they wish”, it is “my political death that one demands”, had directly reacted Marine Le Pen, who believed himself so far protected by the possibility of appealing.
Why will the decision be essential for its political future?
The judgment of this Monday could therefore upset his political career and prevent him from presenting himself in 2027. “If I am forbidden to present myself with provisional execution, that is to say with the impossibility in reality that my appeal could have an influence on the decision which was taken, it would undoubtedly be a deeply anti-democratic decision,” had recently said Marine Le Pen, assuring in Le Figaro In this case, which she would appeal to the decision to “defend again (his) innocence”.
His relatives are nevertheless questioned all over the advisability of a second trial if no penalty of ineligibility was pronounced, or if the impediment of presenting himself in the elections was less than two years, which would allow him to recover his civil rights early enough to contribute to the next presidential election. Disadvantage: not appealing a conviction would amount to admitting his guilt.
A sentence of ineligibility with provisional execution, that is to say immediate, as the prosecution has claimed for the next five years, would also open an abyss of uncertainties. Only a hypothetical decision on a mild appeal could then allow it to place itself on the starting line for 2027 … provided that this second trial takes place before the electoral maturity. “And then if she is sentenced to provisional execution, it makes a preparation for the particular presidential election, anyway, it is a sword of Damocles,” observes a loved one. And if the idea of a “plan B”, like Jordan Bardella, to wear the colors of the party from the presidential election of 2027 is claimed by certain activists, no frame, on the other hand, risks there. In an Ifop-Fiducial study published in early March, 60 % of French people predicted a candidacy of Jordan Bardella as the Presidency of the Republic in two years. 43 % even “want”. One more point than for Marine Le Pen.