Marine Le Pen, the figurehead of France’s populist right, has become the target of a criminal inquiry over suspected fraud in the finances of her last presidential campaign.
Word of the preliminary investigation emerged amid soul-searching in Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National Rally over its surprise loss to the left-wing New Popular Front alliance and President Macron’s centrist bloc in elections on Sunday that ended with a hung parliament and no clear path to a new government.
Paris prosecutors want to know how Le Pen’s campaign spent its €11.5 million (£9.7 million) of funding in her third run for the presidency, in 2022, which ended in defeat by Macron in the run-off round. The inquiry was opened on July 2 to examine allegations of abuses including embezzlement, forgery and fraud, the prosecutor’s office said without giving detail.
Le Pen’s lawyers said they would contest the investigation because the 2022 accounts had been officially audited and approved last year.
The inquiry adds to legal woes facing Le Pen, 55, as she gears up for a new presidential run in 2027. She leads the field in early polling for the election, from which Macron will be barred by a two-term limit in the presidency.
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In September, Le Pen is due to stand trial in Paris along with 24 other defendants on charges of fraudulently using millions of euros of European parliament funds to finance the operations of her party in France. Le Pen, who last year handed day-to-day leadership of the party to Jordan Bardella, her 28-year-old protégé, denies all the charges and depicts them as politically motivated.
After Sunday’s disappointment, Le Pen and Bardella have acknowledged errors after the National Rally enjoyed a spectacular surge, winning the June 30 first round. The party won 54 new seats, taking it to 143, far short of the 289 needed to seat them in government. On Tuesday Gilles Penelle, a National Rally MEP who organised the parliamentary campaign and the selection of candidates, was dismissed from his senior party post.
The party was blocked from victory by a tactical pact between the New Popular Front alliance of left-wing parties and Macron’s Ensemble bloc. Its poor performance was also blamed on the emergence of dozens of candidates who demonstrated incompetence or came with records of racism or antisemitism, facets of the Rally that Le Pen has striven to purge since 2011 when she inherited the formerly extremist party from Jean-Marie Le Pen, its founder and her father.
Le Pen said lessons must be drawn from the errors. Bardella, digesting the first setback in a flawless rise to leadership, said he accepted “my part of the responsibility for the defeat”. He also acknowledged failing to spend enough time in constituencies in support of new candidates.
Bruno Bilde, a senior National Rally MP, said: “We can’t go on like this. The credibility of our candidates is very important … We need to reassure but we had very divisive profiles, sometimes worrying ones.”
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The mainstream parties of left and centre have cut the National Rally out of manoeuvring over the shape of a new government. Macron, whose own government remains in a caretaker role, must designate someone to form an administration but with three minority blocs there is no clear candidate.
The radical side of the left’s New Popular Front, dominated by the divisive Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the firebrand leader of the anti-capitalist France Unbowed, continued to insist that it should claim power and start imposing its plans for raising taxes and spending tens of billions of euros on benefits, higher wages and immediate reversal of Macron’s 2023 two-year-increase in the pension age to 64.
Differences are so wide inside the Front that it has yet to agree on a leader. New bids for the post have come from Olivier Faure, 55, the Socialist leader, and Clémentine Autain, a France Unbowed MP who has broken away from the party.
In the moderate side of the alliance, the Socialists acknowledged that to build a working majority some form of coalition will be required with Macron’s centre bloc, led by his Renaissance party. The notion is being encouraged by Macron, who envisions a broad “unity” alliance that would encompass the moderate wing of the conservative Republicans party as well as the centre-left.
That could enable him to retain a say over government rather than handing power to an opposition majority for his remaining three years in office. Stéphane Séjourné, the head of Macron’s Renaissance party and Macron’s foreign minister, said: “None of the three leading blocs can govern alone. The centrist bloc is ready to talk to all the members of the republican spectrum”.
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The term “republican” is used to distinguish mainstream parties from the radical right and left, represented by the National Rally and France Unbowed.
No new government is expected to emerge until well after the Paris Olympics, which open in a fortnight.
