PARIS (AP) — French far-right leader Marine Le Pen denied violating any rules as she and her National Rally party and two dozen others went on trial on Monday, accused of embezzling European Parliament funds, in a case that has the potential to derail her political ambitions.
Arriving at the court in Paris, Le Pen said she remained confident as “we have not violated any political and regulatory rules of the European Parliament” and vowed to present the judges with “extremely serious and extremely solid arguments.″
Le Pen and other National Rally members casually greeted each other before sitting down in the first three rows of the packed courtroom.
The nine-week trial will be closely watched by Le Pen’s political rivals as she is a strong contender in the race to succeed Emmanuel Macron when the next presidential election takes place in 2027.
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Denies any wrongdoing
Sorry but I don’t care of you’re left or right but that denial is not news, it doesn’t mean anything. No politician would be “oh yeah, that was me!”, so THAT would actually be news. This just “because of course she says that”, wake me up when she’s convicted
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https://apnews.com/article/le-pen-embezzling-eu-funds-far-right-2cf9684146178c978bce402d0d73521f
When they get their orders and talking points directly from Russia’s FSB, they don’t have to hire legislative staff to work for their constituents, do research on issues, and solve problems.
They can use the money for political campaigning instead. No wonder they’re successful!
Good thinking! /s
I believe that she thinks embezzling isn’t wrong.
Her argument is that “Parliamentary assistants do not work for the Parliament. They are political assistants to elected officials, political by definition”, so basically she says they can do whatever they want with the EU Parliament money if it is the decision of an elected person, which is clearly not the rules for this fund and she knows it.
To make it juicer, they found records of her party members explicitly estimating that they should not do that because it is embezzlement.
For context, this comes from a time when her party wanted Frexit similarly to the Brexit party in the UK, which the same irrational arguments. So misusing EU money was completely aligned with their idea to damage the relation. Turns out, Frexit was very unpopular even within right wing French people, so they pivoted to some kind of small EU now.
Doesn’t matter where they’re from, or what language they speak, or even particularly what the laws are in your country: The far right are criminals, every single fucking one of them.
