Marine Le Pen waited for seven long hours on Wednesday, October 2, before she was able to speak her mind, just before 9 pm. The presiding judge, Bénédicte de Perthuis, had a schedule, and she stuck to it.

Le Pen, as the former president of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN, called Front National at the time of the prosecuted events, FN), was asked to give “some background” on the case in which she and her party are accused of having used European Parliament funds meant for parliamentary assistants to pay for unrelated work that should have been on the party’s payroll.

The prosecution projected tables in court showing that the 27 defendants embezzled €3,213,000 from 2004 to 2016. But the case is complex and the RN party itself is also being prosecuted for “complicity and concealment of misappropriation of public funds.” It must therefore also answer for the contracts of parliamentary assistants who are not being individually prosecuted – this brings the bill up to €4,503,000. The party’s lawyers, who had missed these decisive lines in the indictment, were stunned.

Another setback for the RN was the news that the period of time covered by the prosecution could be extended: The prosecutor’s office will be issuing new indictments. Much to Le Pen’s dismay: “We were asked about a precise period by the investigating judge,” said Le Pen, “and today we’re being told that it might be five years before or five years after!” She also wanted to point out that there were “an enormous number of preconceived ideas in the file, which have been fabricated by the plaintiff [the European Parliament]. They’ve tried to put us into a tunnel from which we can’t get out.”

Administration ‘makes mistakes’

Le Pen insisted that “the leadership of the European Parliament is not neutral, it is political.” What’s more, “we have the impression that the administration is faultless, but it makes mistakes like all administrations,” like misplacing files, for example. She added: “It would be unfortunate not to admit that we are the bête noire of the European Parliament: The idea that there could be MEPs who are opposed to the construct of the European Union is something that disturbs people, even though we were elected for that.”

She continued with a scathing attack on the investigators of the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), who started the investigation. She accused OLAF of “forcing its ideas onto the Parliament, which pushed them through the judicial investigation.” OLAF, she claimed, waited until the RN’s delegation grew from 3 to 24 MEPs in the June 2014 elections to launch an investigation into the party.

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