These are embarrassing revelations, which the cover of Playboy will perhaps not forget. Created by the current Secretary of State Marlène Schiappa, when she was Minister Delegate in charge of Citizenship, the Marianne Fund made it possible to finance a mysterious association which disseminated political content against opponents of Emmanuel Macron during the last elections, reveals Mediapart this Wednesday.
Investigations by France 2 and Marianne magazine had already highlighted the opaque management of the “Marianne fund”, created by Marlène Schiappa after the assassination of Samuel Paty, to support actors in the fight against radicalization. A grant of 260,000 euros, paid to the Union of Physical Education and Preparation for Military Service Societies (USEPPM), particularly raises questions since its leaders were paid up to 120,000 euros from this fund. An investigation has since been opened with the General Inspectorate of Administration to clarify the situation.
But the revelations of Mediapart concern another association, also beneficiaries of this “Marianne fund”. Rebuild the common – that’s its name – was able to benefit from a grant of 330,000 euros, when it had just been created and had no known activity when it applied for the call to projects to benefit from the fund, says Mediapart. The statutes of the association were registered on October 29, 2020, thirteen days after the assassination of Samuel Paty. They were submitted to the prefecture on February 14, 2021, two months before the launch of the call for applications for the Marianne fund, on April 20, 2021.
Videos with political content
In its project, the association sets its ambition: “to deploy a republican discourse adapted to the codes and cultural references of 18-25 year olds on social networks and on the Web in the form of videos, visuals, memes, interviews, reports, documentaries and events”. This was done well: from January 2022 to August 2022, 57 videos were produced and broadcast. But these and their content raise questions.
Mediapart, which has thus dissected these videos, notes “an obvious bias, without contradiction”, a content which “declines the obsessions of part of the presidential majority”. Some content also attacks “virulently” opponents of Emmanuel Macron. Thus, in a program broadcast ten days before the legislative elections, it is about the camp “of reason” that would be LREM, and the “extreme” that would be the Nupes or the RN. However, as Mediapart reminds us, using public means to influence the outcome of an election is prohibited.
The subsidy paid to this association raises questions all the more since the association will only have “lived” during the electoral campaigns, underlines Mediapart. “The project is currently on hiatus for professional and personal reasons, nuance its president Ahlam Menouni to the newspaper. A break is not a stop, on the contrary, we are very proud of what we have started. »
Schiappa denies being involved in the selection
In a press release, published after the first revelations, Marlène Schiappa’s cabinet denied that the minister had had a say in the beneficiaries. “Wrongly asserting that it was an ad hominem decision by Marlène Schiappa is totally false and denied by the procedure, just as it is totally false to claim that it would be friends of the minister”, he explained. And to continue: “Following controls – planned from the launch of the fund – on the use of the funds, sixteen of the seventeen winning associations justify their proper use. »