The defense is a little paradoxical: The lawyers for the Rassemblement National (RN) have chosen to undermine the entire case of the far-right party's assistants in the European Parliament from the inside, in increasing disorder and with dubious effectiveness. It's all about shattering the idea that the Front National (the RN's predecessor) had set up a financing system through fake jobs in Brussels, and above all about preserving party leader Marine Le Pen and her ability to run for president. Too bad if there's collateral damage. The other defendants' cases are barely mentioned and hardly defended at all. In fact, most of the accused didn't even appear in court to hear their lawyers – and doing so would only have hurt their morale.
So, after François Wagner, who defended four people on his own Monday, Nicolay Fakiroff pleaded, on Tuesday; November 19, for three clients in one go, and not insignificant ones: three members of the European Parliament at the time – Louis Aliot, now the RN's number two, and two former party vice presidents, Nicolas Bay and Bruno Gollnisch. The lawyer had kind words for his clients: "The unstoppable Gollnisch, the bard of the Gallic village," the one who regularly ends up silenced in Astérix; Aliot, "so expansive, so affable, who observes a stubborn silence" while his assistant "relieved his conscience"; and Bay, whose lawyer pointed out that he had submitted a false file, in case the court had forgotten.
For two hours, Fakiroff stressed two strong points that "formed the spine" of his thinking. "Marine Le Pen said it, but who does the member of Parliament work for? Is it for themself? She has a political, constitutional vision of parties, which contribute to the exercise of suffrage." Then there was Guillaume L'Huillier, Gollnisch's first assistant, "who exclaimed: 'It's not because you're a parliamentary assistant that you become an activist, it's because you're an activist that you become a parliamentary assistant.'" In short, a parliamentarian is inevitably involved in politics, and so is his assistant. But from there to being paid by Parliament to work for the party, there is a threshold, which Fakiroff was careful not to cross.
He downplayed the "unprecedented scale of the fraud" highlighted by the prosecution, dividing the €4.6 million embezzled by the total number of MEPs per year, minus sums already reimbursed, to arrive at a total of €22,000 per year per MEP. This he compared with a total parliamentary budget of €2.5 billion. "Where are your taxes going?" asked the lawyer indignantly. He described the prosecutor's indictments as "unworthy," just good enough to issue "certificates of infamy," in particular to Gollisch, with the prosecutors asking for a ban from running for office though "his political future is behind him" and he only aspires to be a local councilor to his village of 600 inhabitants.
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