French police raid extreme-right National Rally headquarters over campaign financing

MARSEILLE, France (CN) — Police raided France’s extreme-right National Rally headquarters in Paris Wednesday as part of an ongoing investigation into its campaign financing on both domestic and European fronts.

The probe is linked to the 2022 French presidential and legislative campaigns, and the 2024 European campaigns. The French state partially reimburses campaign expenses.

“The judicial investigation is intended to determine whether these campaigns were financed, in particular, through Illegal loans from individuals benefiting the National Rally party or candidates, as well as overcharging for services or fictitious invoices for services subsequently included in requests for lump-sum reimbursement of campaign expenses by the state,” the Paris Prosecutor’s Office said.

Company offices and homes of company leaders were also searched as part of a judicial investigation against an unnamed individual opened on July 3, 2024, after various reports from institutional sources. The office said no charges have been filed.

Despite a slew of legal issues in the past few months — including a conviction for Marine Le Pen, the party leader, for embezzling public funds in a fake jobs scheme that left her ineligible to run for office for five years — the National Rally asserts the action is just the latest instance of a political witch hunt designed to keep the party out of power.

“This display of force has only one purpose: to provide a spectacle for news channels, to rummage through the private correspondence of the leading opposition party, to seize all our internal documents,” Jordan Bardella, president of the party, known by its French initials RN, posted via X on Wednesday morning. “Nothing to do with justice, everything to do with politics.”

In a newsletter sent on Wednesday afternoon, the RN wrote that 20 armed officers from the financial brigade — wearing bulletproof vests and accompanied by two investigating judges — searched the offices of party leaders and seized documents, emails and archives.

All accounting data and documents for the upcoming elections are now in the hands of the court, officials wrote in the email. It admits to receiving loans from individuals — one of the issues that the prosecutor’s office is investigating — but says they were perfectly legal. Wednesday’s raid was an example of “political harassment” and “a crude attempt at intimidation,” they wrote, echoing another post on X from Bardella earlier in the day.

“We don’t even know exactly what the charges are,” leaders wrote. “What we do know, however, is that this operation marks a new level in the judicial harassment of France’s leading party.”

The RN has been in hot water since Le Pen’s conviction, when she was sentenced to four years in prison, two suspended and two to be served with an ankle bracelet at home. She was also slapped with a roughly $108,000 fine. But the biggest issue at stake was the ineligibility clause; she was widely seen as a leading candidate in the 2027 presidential elections.

On Tuesday, Le Pen asked the European Court of Human Rights to help her shed the ban. She has repeatedly argued that the ruling was undemocratic, and a candidate’s eligibility for office should be decided by voters rather than a court.

On the same day, EU prosecutors opened a probe into Le Pen’s party for misuse of funds from the far-right Identity and Democracy group, which included members of parliament from the RN. The now-defunct group is being investigated for misusing roughly $5 million in European Parliament funds.

The party continues to frame all the investigations as an attack on democracy.

“There’s the National Rally’s narrative of playing the victim, of saying that after Marine Le Pen’s conviction, the RN’s new difficulties in the European Parliament are further proof of the judicial harassment they’re facing,” Olivier Costa, a director at the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po, told Courthouse News. “But … the National Rally has really distinguished itself in recent years by its systematic circumvention of the rules governing political financing — it’s practically the only party that resorts to this.”

In Costa’s view, recent investigations into the RN could fuel some voters to support them more fully in line with the witch hunt narrative, while alienating others.

“It’s like Donald Trump’s fans; You can say he’s had 15 run-ins with the law, but that doesn’t bother them, they consider he hasn’t done anything and that all this is just harassment,” he explained. “So, for true RN activists, this won’t be a problem — they’ll always find explanations to say that it’s all a conspiracy.”

Costa thinks that less die-hard RN voters might be more skeptical. In French presidential elections, voting occurs in two rounds; the leading two candidates from the first progress to a runoff in the second. A popular saying holds that “in the first round you vote with your heart, and the second with your head.” Le Pen has been in the final round in the two most recent elections, ultimately won by French President Emmanuel Macron.

“What’s much more problematic for the RN are the second-round voters,” Costa said. “And these people, perhaps, will start to have difficulty voting for a party that, every six months, is condemned to something else because it has misused public money.”

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