In the week before her showdown with globalist incumbent Emmanuel Macron in France’s presidential election, fraud investigators for the European Union have accused Marine Le Pen of the National Rally party of misusing public funds. The EU’s fraud agency, OLAF, claims that Le Pen and other members of National Rally appropriated more than €600,000 (approximately $650,000) between 2004 and 2017.
OLAF accused Le Pen and her National Rally (formerly the National Front) colleagues of “grave violations” and “inappropriate behavior.” Further, the anti-fraud bureaucracy claimed that Le Pen and her party brethren may have “imperiled the reputation of the Union’s institutions.”
Le Pen herself is accused of using €137,000 of public funds for national political purposes, personal expenses or for services that would benefit commercial companies close to her National Rally party while she was a member of European Parliament (MEP). Also accused are Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, her ex-partner Louis Aliot, and an allied MEP, Bruno Gollnisch.
Le Pen is in a tight race with Macron — she won roughly 23 percent of the vote compared to Macron’s roughly 28 percent in the 12-person first round of voting. The accusations against her became public on Easter Sunday, exactly one week before France goes to the polls for the second round of the national election.
Le Pen has denied any wrongdoing, claiming the report is “foul play by the European Union a few days before the second round.”
On Monday, during a campaign stop in Normandy, Le Pen noted, “I am well accustomed to this, and I think the French will absolutely not fall for it.”
Indeed she is “well accustomed” to the tactic: It was used in 2017 by the same EU bureaucrats.
Le Pen’s lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, was equally suspicious of the timing of the allegations. Bosselut said he was “dismayed by the way that OLAF is acting” and accused the anti-fraud agency of investigating “old facts more than ten years old.”
“I’m surprised by the timing of such a strong disclosure” and the “instrumentalisation,” Bosselut told French news agency AFP. The attorney added that Le Pen “has not been summoned by any French judicial authority.”
“Marine Le Pen contests this. She contests it without having had access to the details of the accusations. It’s a manipulation, and unfortunately, I’m not surprised,” Bosselut added.
The Paris prosecutor’s office is reportedly “in the course of analyzing” the new report and adds that no formal investigation has been opened as of yet.
The timing of the new investigation is, to say the least, curious: literally one week before the second round of the national election is set to take place, and just days before a nationally televised debate scheduled for Wednesday.
The EU-approved Macron reportedly has a slim lead over Le Pen for the presidency. Le Pen lost the earlier contest between the two in 2017, but thinks she’s in a better place this time around. The National Rally candidate also looks for the coming contest to be a battle of ideology, rather than a mud-throwing contest.
“I hope it’s a real confrontation of ideas and not the succession of invective, fake news and excess like I’ve heard over the past week,” Le Pen said on Monday.
Macron emanated confidence on Sunday, saying his campaign was “a winning project that deserves to be known” and expressed that Le Pen had yet to explain her platform clearly. The French president said he had a “feeling that on the far-right side, there is a programme that deserves to be clarified.”
Current polls have Macron receiving between 52 and 54 percent of the votes in the second round but, perhaps, the EU’s own internal polling shows that the race is tighter than it appears. They still remember what happened with Brexit and Trump in 2016.
Among Le Pen’s plans should she win are to push for strict immigration laws and prioritizing French citizens over migrants. The globalists in the EU can hardly accept such a platform from a national leader. Furthermore, with all in-person voting and paper ballots, French elections are more difficult to tamper with. That they would try to smear her just before the election in order to ensure she doesn’t win is not outside the realm of possibility.
