In June 2024, two days after President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the Assemblée Nationale, France's political landscape was bracing for a major upheaval as Eric Ciotti, president of the conservative Les Républicains, joined forces with the far-right Rassemblement National (RN). While TV crews waited outside the far-right party's headquarters in Paris's 16th arrondissement, the man who had long envisioned such an alliance was entering the national judicial police's offices in nearby Nanterre. On that day, Pierre-Edouard Stérin was questioned as a "free suspect" in a preliminary investigation into alleged illegal campaign funding, Le Monde has learned. The Marseille prosecutor's office, which is leading the proceedings, confirmed the information.
The investigators have been looking into the role of the billionaire, a staunch supporter of a free-market, reactionary and xenophobic agenda, in an alleged system of illegal funding of RN election campaigns in 2020 and 2021, mainly in southeastern France. The investigation, which has been expanded to examine possible money laundering and illegal banking, has been conducted in strict secrecy since 2021 by the financial crime unit of the Marseille judicial police. "The purpose of the investigation is to determine the conditions in which loans intended to fund the campaigns of several candidates in these elections were granted," the prosecutor's office told Le Monde, citing no fewer than seven major elections: the 2020 municipal elections in Marseille, Nice and Lyon, and 2021 regional elections in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, Occitanie, Normandy and Centre-Val de Loire.
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