2024-10-15 00:10:00
Marine Le Pen defended herself step by step, with intact energy after seven long hours of questioning: this must be the habit of nights of parliamentary debate. She didn’t give an inch, with as much pride as authority, and the defense lawyers were but a poor complement. The Pas-de-Calais deputy certainly often intervenes in the trial against the European assistants of the National Front (FN, which became the National Rally in 2018), when her former collaborators drown in their contradictions. But on Monday 14 October, and until Wednesday, in front of the criminal court in Paris, she is the one who is directly targeted for “misappropriation of public funds” and she intends to issue her own ruling.
Marine Le Pen, however, is walking a tightrope between an offensive political defense and the need to justify the work of her assistants. “The European Parliament swallows up the deputies, there you can sleep, eat, go to the hairdresser, everything is done so that the elected representatives live isolated, said the far-right leader. Our task is to extract them from this living environment, to make them enter politics. » For her it is not possible to distinguish the president of the RN from the MEP, “In Parliament, when there were three of us, then seven, we had an epsilonistic weight. We were left with the fact that the word politics, the mandate, is also a political activity.”
Same thing for parliamentary assistants, “shared”, that is, who worked for multiple deputies, “without the administration telling us anything”assures Le Pen. But the MP works for his party, and his assistants work for him: this is what the European Parliament accuses him of having paid assistants who actually worked for the party at his expense, something expressly prohibited. “I don’t think I have committed the slightest irregularity”However, the MP protests, seeing the process as a subtle settling of scores by the former Social Democratic President of Parliament Martin Schulz.
“It’s not for the party, it’s for the good of the party”
Lᵉ Patrick Maisonneuve, Parliament’s lawyer, reminds her of having declared: “When parliamentary assistants were not strictly occupied with parliamentary duties, they could, at the request of their MP, work for the party of which all the MPs are members…” Marine Le Pen “formally competitions” having said that. How unfortunate, he said it, and wrote: this is an opening complaint read to the investigating judge. “You’re looking for the little beasttempts the accused, it’s not for the party, it’s for the benefit of the party. »
#beast