The French Prosecutor’s Office opens an investigation into Le Pen a week before the presidential elections

The French prosecutor investigates the party of Marine LePen for the alleged embezzlement of 600,000 euros funds from the European Parliament. At the beginning of March, French magistrates received a report from the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) accusing the National Regrouping (RN, until 2018 it was called the National Front) of having appropriated a considerable amount of money from the European Parliament, as revealed on Saturday by the digital newspaper media part. This information is one more obstacle for the far-right candidate in the final stretch of the presidential campaign, in which she will face President Emmanuel Macron in the second round on April 24.

The prosecution is analyzing this report in which Le Pen is accused of having embezzled some 137,000 euros between 2004 and 2017, when he served as an MEP. OCLAF also accuses his father Jean-Marie LePenfounder of this far-right formation in 2012, of having appropriated some 303,000 euros for his personal or partisan purposes, away from the European parliamentary activity to which these subsidies are intended.

The forceful report accuses the ultra MEPs of having carried out overinvoicing, financed party activities with continental subsidies, diverted funds through fictitious orders to satellite companies or having paid with European money for products for purely personal use, such as the purchase by part of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s 129 bottles of wine and champagne of luxury brands to celebrate the New Year’s Eve party in his Parisian mansion in 2016. Rodolphe Bosselut, lawyer of the ultra applicant, has criticized the “coincidence & rdquor; with the publication of this information with “the second round campaign & rdquor ;.

It’s not the first affair related to the embezzlement of European funds that splashes the nationalist Le Pen. The leader of the RN had already been indicted in 2018 for the “diversion of public funds & rdquor; through the alleged use for partisan purposes of parliamentary assistants in the European Parliament, which demanded the return of some 300,000 euros. However, all this involvement in cases of corruption and other shady matters, such as having received two loans from Russian banks, do not usually affect Le Pen’s voting intentions, second in the first round with more than 23% of the votes. votes.

According to the latest polls, Macron would prevail in the second round with 55% of the vote, while Le Pen would obtain 45%. Although it is a much tighter distance that in 2017 —then the centrist leader won with 66%—, in the last week he slightly increased his advantage.

Once the campaign focused on the duel between the two finalists, the leader of the RN lost the perfect lightning rod that was the debater Eric Zemmour. The French press has focused much more on criticizing the unconstitutional nature of some of its main promises, such as the “national priority & rdquor; that would leave foreigners without social assistance. It has also been hampered by its radical proposal to ban islamic headscarf in the public space, a measure nuanced this weekend by leaders of his party.

Thanks to all her communicative tricks, the reptilian Le Pen has based her entire campaign on stopping being scary. In this way, she intends to turn the elections into a referendum against the centrist leader. “I think it is a mandate of more than Macron that poses a risk to the country & rdquor ;, she said on Thursday at a rally in Avignon, in the south of France. “In these elections many French they will not vote in favor of a projectbut against the other & rdquor ;, regrets in statements to El Periódico the political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, director of the Observatory of Political Radicalities of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, related to the Socialist Party.

A democratic cordon to prevent the extreme right from coming to power. Or a protest front against the centrist leader. It is the dilemma of a considerable part of the voters regarding elections that will have an unexpected referee: the left-wing electorate, especially that of the rebellious Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who came third with almost 22%.

After rivers of ink have flowed in recent years about the debatable theory of rightwing of France —instead of becoming more conservative, the neighboring country seems to have fragmented into three almost identical blocs (a liberal center, a nationalist far-right and a socio-ecologist left)—progressive voters will have the last word in the repetition of the Macron-Le Pen. For the third time in the last twenty years, a candidate from the extreme right is contesting the second round. Unlike Jean-Marie Le Pen’s traumatic qualification for the 2002 electoral final, this time there has been no electroshock in French society.

Less than 23,000 people They demonstrated on Saturday in protests against the extreme right in several locations, called by unions and progressive organizations such as Greenpeace or the League of Human Rights. This low turnout reflects the fatigue of a part of the French before the electoral gesture of voting for that candidate who faces the extreme right.