Facing Embezzlement Charges, Marine Le Pen Plays the Victim
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is embroiled in an embezzlement trial that could see her barred from public office. After long demanding such bans for corrupt politicians, she now casts herself as victim of a judicial conspiracy.
Marine Le Pen answering questions from journalists after meeting with French Prime Minister Michel Barnier at the Hotel Matignon in Paris on November 25, 2024. (Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP via Getty Images)
Judges will soon deliberate on one of France’s most charged corruption cases in recent memory, when two months of court hearings over allegations against Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National end this Wednesday. The far-right party and its leader stand accused of embezzling millions of euros over a twelve-year period through false employment claims for aides to its members of the European Parliament (MEPs). The prosecutors claim that the Rassemblement National unduly appointed party cadres as MEPs’ assistants, thereby securing extra funding for work unrelated to the European Parliament. Le Pen’s defense has dismissed the accusations, claiming they misconstrue the often-overlapping roles — from actual legislative work to campaign activities — that officials take on to ensure the functioning of a modern political party.
This affair first emerged in 2014 when Le Pen — at the time an MEP and president of what was then known as the Front National — was the object of an EU investigation over the fictitious employment of two aides: her bodyguard Thierry Léger and Catherine Griset, who was her chief of staff. Griset, this June elected to her own second term as MEP, received a salary as a parliamentary aide between October 2014 and August 2015, despite spending a total of just twelve hours at the European Parliament. The funds transferred to Griset and Léger were estimated at €340,000 euros, but subsequent EU and French investigations revealed that a far larger web of individuals were involved. The European Parliament — a civil party in the current case — estimates that as much as €6.8 million euros were syphoned off in a scheme implicating over twenty Front National officials between 2004 and 2016. In a June 2014 message to Le Pen, then party treasurer Wallerand de Saint-Just wrote, “We will only stay afloat if we can make some considerable savings thanks to the European Parliament.”
Fictitious employment has been at the center of several high-profile corruption cases in France, where parliamentary aides’ work is paid out of the public purse. This has been exploited by various political forces, whether for personal enrichment or as a means to cover up holes in party finances. The campaign of François Fillon — expected favorite in the 2017 presidential race as candidate for the right-wing Républicains — was sunk when he became embroiled in a scandal surrounding payments to his wife for fictitious administrative work during Fillon’s time as a parliamentarian in the 1990s and 2000s. The pair was later convicted. Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the French Communist Party, was put under investigation in 2022 for alleged embezzlement as a parliamentary aide in the late 2000s. A key ally of President Emmanuel Macron since 2017, François Bayrou was acquitted this February after fictitious employment allegations were raised against his MoDem party.
What seems to set the Rassemblement National case apart is the apparent scale of the operation, which prosecutors described as an “organized system” to skim off cash from the European Parliament and into the pockets of party officials. In their sentencing demands, the state’s attorneys sought a tough penalty for the far-right leader, including a five-year ban on seeking national office. That would block Le Pen, the Rassemblement National’s presumed standard-bearer in the 2027 presidential elections, from even running. Le Pen, who is an MP in France’s National Assembly, would not have to step down from her seat in the current parliament.
Prosecutors likewise requested a five-year prison sentence (three years suspended, and two possibly to be served with an electronic tag) and €300,000 in damages against Le Pen. A series of lighter prison and ineligibility sentences were requested against the twenty-four other defendants from the Rassemblement National, which could also face a multimillion-euro fine. The judges are expected to deliver an initial ruling in early 2025.
Victimized?
Le Pen claims she is being silenced in what amounts to a political trial. “The prosecutors want to deprive me and the French people of voting for who they want. That’s the goal,” she told journalists outside the courtroom on November 13, slamming the ineligibility sentence requested by the state’s attorneys. For their part, government officials insist that this is just the justice system at work, pointing to the independence of prosecutors and their requirement to apply the law as written and approved by the people’s representatives in parliament. While the possibility of declaring a convict ineligible for office had existed already, a 2016 law passed under Socialist president François Hollande made this an automatic sentencing requirement against elected officials shown to have embezzled public funds.
In fact, Le Pen once cast herself as a staunch critic of the frequent embezzlement scandals that bubbled up in the 1990s and 2000s. One video that has circulated incessantly in recent weeks features Le Pen in 2004, up in arms over pocket-lining by French politicians. “Everyone has dipped their hand in the register, except the Front National. And we’re supposed to think that’s normal?” she said. “The French aren’t tired of hearing about these scandals! They’re tired of the scandals! They’re tired of seeing elected officials, I’m sorry to say it, who embezzle public money. It’s scandalous.”
Twenty years later and Le Pen and her allies are singing a different tune, calling out what they claim is a politically coordinated attack against their party. “The prosecutor’s office is not on the side of justice; it’s going for prosecution and vengeance against Marine Le Pen,” Jordan Bardella, the Rassemblement National’s official president since 2022, tweeted on Twitter/X, as the #jesoutiensmarine (“I Support Marine”) hashtag circulated among far-right sympathizers. “These scandalous sentencing demands aim to deprive millions of French people of their vote in 2027. It’s an attack on democracy.” The Rassemblement National has posted a petition in defense of “Marine” to its website, tarring the case as “an attempt to eliminate the voice of the real opposition.”
Even figures formally opposed to Le Pen have expressed misgivings about the possible sentencing against her. Christian Estrosi, a member of the center-right Horizons party allied with the Macronists in parliament, has urged legislators to unwind automatic ineligibility sentencing, calling it “a dangerous principle that amputates democratic debate.” Eager to shore up support on the Right before his own possible presidential run in 2027, former interior minister Gérald Darmanin also took to Twitter/X to write that “it would be extremely shocking if Marine Le Pen is declared ineligible. . . . Let’s not be afraid of democracy and let’s stop digging, even further, the gap between ‘elites’ and the immense majority of our citizens.”
That’s a strange re-definition of democracy and of the role of the court system by Macron’s former interior minister. Speaking on France 5 this week, Fabrice Arfi — head of investigative reporting at Mediapart, which has closely tracked the Le Pen affair since it emerged — lamented that the facts of the case are being crowded out by the high-profile nature of the defendant. “For thirteen years this has been under investigation, and that’s not what we’re talking about on the morning and evening news,” said Arfi. “The event is not that a party in national politics is accused of embezzling . . . the problem is when Marine Le Pen decides to make it into a political scandal.”
No Confidence
But even a to-the-letter application of the law against Le Pen was bound to aggravate the far right’s aggressive critique of the judiciary. For all the uproar over Le Pen’s current legal travails, the party has spent years attacking the supposed “laxity” of a justice system, said to be over-indulgent in its treatment of criminal offenders. It advocates automatic “minimum punishments” to reduce magistrates’ discretion. French judges are also accused of hamstringing the clampdown on immigration into France; last January’s Constitutional Council decision to block some of the strictest elements of an omnibus 2023 immigration law provoked outrage across the far right. What remained was for Le Pen to be made into a personal martyr and victim of allegedly politicized prosecutors. The far right will turn this latest affair into just that — even if judges walk back the prosecutors’ demands.
Some commentators are even speculating that Le Pen’s legal troubles are behind the elevated tensions between the Rassemblement National group in parliament and the minority government headed by Prime Minister Michel Barnier. Formed after Macronists and conservatives reached an uneasy alliance in September, Barnier’s government is entering the final weeks of tense negotiations over the 2025 budget package. Without the votes needed to win a conventional up or down vote, the premier could soon be forced to enact the finance bill through a special constitutional provision, known as Article 49.3.
Using the “49.3,” as the provision is known, would expose Barnier to a vote of no-confidence, which Le Pen and her allies have increasingly expressed their willingness to support. If the far right and the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire all back such a motion over the budget, they would have the votes to sink the government. Barnier “is on the road” toward being no-confidenced, Rassemblement National president Bardella said on November 18.
Barnier and Le Pen are scheduled to meet on Monday. And if the far-right leader’s legal troubles will surely not be part of the haggling, she can be expected to raise the price tag for her party’s continued support of his already beleaguered premiership.