Far-right leader Marine Le Pen defended herself vigorously for seven hours, demonstrating the stamina typical of parliamentary debate nights. She stood her ground with as much pride as authority, with the defense lawyers playing a minimal role. Le Pen often intervenes in the fake jobs trial of the former Front National party (which was renamed Rassemblement National, RN, in 2018), when her former aids are drowning in their contradictions. However, from Monday, October 14 to Wednesday, October 16, before the Paris Criminal Court, she is the only one being directly targeted for "misappropriation of public funds," and she intends to give her all.

Le Pen is on a knife-edge, balancing an aggressive political defense with the need to justify the work of her assistants. "The European Parliament swallows up MEPs, there you can sleep, eat, go to the hairdresser, everything is done so that elected representatives live in a closed environment," said LePen. "Our job is to get them out of that environment and into politics." For her, it's impossible to distinguish the RN president (a post she held from 2011 to 2021) from the MEP (another post she held from 2004 to 2017), "in Parliament, when there were three of us, then seven, we had an epsilonian weight. All we had left was the political word, the mandate, which is also political activity."

Le Pen also defended her parliamentary assistants, who were "mutualized," meaning they worked for several MEPs, "without the administration telling us anything." However, the MEP works for their party, while their assistants work for them: this is indeed what the European Parliament is accusing Le Pen of, of having paid assistants who, in reality, worked for the party, which is explicitly forbidden. "I don't feel I've committed the slightest irregularity," said the former MEP, who sees the trial as a devious settling of scores by the former Social Democrat president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz.

Patrick Maisonneuve, the Parliament's lawyer, reminded her of her statement: "When parliamentary assistants were not strictly occupied with parliamentary tasks, they could at the request of their MEP work for the party of which the MEPs are all members..." Le Pen "formally denies" having said this. Unluckily for her, she indeed said it and wrote it as part of an opening statement read to the investigating judge. "You're grasping at straws... It's not for the party, it's for the benefit of the party," she added.

You have 47.03% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.