The headquarters of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in Paris were raided in the early hours of Wednesday morning, with police seizing documents and computers, prompting accusations of politically inspired lawfare.
“Since 8:50 this morning, the headquarters of the National Rally – including the offices of its leaders – have been subject to a search conducted by about twenty financial brigade police officers, armed and wearing bulletproof vests, accompanied by two investigating judges,” National Rally president Jordan Bardella said on Wednesday.
According to Le Figaro, the raid on the populist party’s Paris HQ stems from an investigation started last year into alleged illegal loans to finance Marine Le Pen’s 2022 presidential campaign, the subsequent legislative elections in France, and the European Parliament elections in 2024, which the party won a commanding victory over President Macron’s neo-liberal coalition.
Prosecutors allege that the RN had over 20 million euros in outstanding loans as of the end of 2023, with the earliest dating back to 2007. Unpaid loans could thus be seen as a means of evading campaign finance rules, as they would effectively serve as “disguised donations,” explained Christian Charpy, the head of the National Commission for Campaign Accounts and Political Financing.
The raid on Wednesday followed an announcement by European prosecutors on Tuesday of a separate investigation into the party, who allege that the party “unduly spent” over 4.3 million euros between 2019 and 2024, reportedly on firms tied to relatives of Madame Le Pen.
This came on top of another trial involving the populist leader, who faces a potential five-year ban from running for public office over allegedly spending EU party funds to finance political operations in France. An appeal is currently underway.
National Rally President Jordan Bardella said of the raids: “This operation, spectacular and unprecedented, is clearly part of a new harassment campaign. It is a serious attack on pluralism and democratic alternation. Never has an opposition party faced such relentless targeting under the Fifth Republic.”
Bardella said that “all emails, documents, and accounting records” were seized without the party being provided the exact reason for their confiscation.
He argued that the loans in question often came from National Rally activists, who helped provide the party with loans due to the banking industry typically refusing to work with the populist party.
“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,” Bardella said, adding: “Nothing to do with justice, everything to do with politics.”
National Rally MP Sébastien Chenu said: “Unable now of preventing us from coming to power, the system sinks into sordid manoeuvres of judicial harassment spectacle”
It also comes amid broader accusations of lawfare being used throughout the EU to prevent right-wing populist parties from taking power, including the re-opening of a previously quashed case this month against former Czech PM Andrej Babiš, who currently stands as the frontrunner in the upcoming elections in October.
Similar claims of lawfare were made after the arrest and banning of Călin Georgescu in Romania’s elections, following his surprise victory in the first round of voting in last November’s elections, which were cancelled amid claims of Russian interference.
Meanwhile, the anti-mass migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which now stands as the principal opposition in the Bundestag, also faces a potential ban in the wake of Berlin’s domestic spy agency officially branding the party as an “extremist” organisation.
