The National Rally assistants affair ("Affaire des assistants parlementaires du Rassemblement national") is an ongoing legal case concering the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement national, RN) party in France. 27 members of the party, including its leader Marine Le Pen, are accused of having hired fictitious European Parliament assistants between 2004 and 2016 to misappropriate funds.
The National Rally, formerly the National Front (Front national), is a far-right political party in France. It has been led by Marine Le Pen since 2012, who has undertaken a process of de-demonisation to soften the party's image and received a record 41,5% of the vote in the second round of the 2022 French presidential election.
Investigation
In January 2014, the European Anti-Fraud Office opened an investigation into Marine Le Pen after receiving a tip-off alleging that she had hired fictitious assistants during her term as an MEP, which began in 2004. The investigation found that Catherine Griset, Le Pen's chief of staff, had only worked around 12 hours between October 2014 and August 2015, when she was supposedly Le Pen's assistant.[1]
As the investigation continued, it widened to include a number of other RN politicians who had served as MEPs or had been hired as assistants to MEPs, including Louis Aliot, Bruno Gollnisch, Julien Odoul, and Nicolas Bay.[2]
In December 2023, French authorities announced that they would be charging Le Pen and twenty-six other members of the RN with embezzlement, with a trial to be held before the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris.[3] If the trial finds her guilty, she could face up to ten years incarceration and be barred from running for election for ten years.[4]
Trial
The trial for the affair began in September 2024.[5]
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