Marine Le Pen: French prosecutor seeks jail sentence and election ban in EU embezzlement trial

Paris prosecutors have requested a five-year prison sentence and a five-year ban from public office — including the French presidency — for far-right leader Marine Le Pen in a trial over the suspected embezzlement of European Parliament funds.

Le Pen, her National Rally (RN) party, and 24 others — party officials, employees, ex-lawmakers and parliamentary assistants — are accused of having used money intended for EU parliamentary aides to instead pay staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the bloc’s regulations. The RN was then called the National Front.

Prosecutors on Wednesday asked the court to find Le Pen guilty of embezzlement, hand her a jail sentence of five years — three of which would be suspended — and fine her €300,000. They also requested a five-year period of ineligibility to run for office, with a provisional execution.

This means that if the court finds Le Pen guilty of the charges, she would not be able to run in elections even if she files an appeal, ruling the three-time presidential candidate from standing again in the 2027 election.

Le Pen did not show any emotion in the courtroom on Wednesday as she listened to the prosecutors' demands.

“It’s no surprise,” she told reporters later on Wednesday. "I note that the prosecutors' claims are extremely outrageous."

Le Pen said she felt prosecutors were "only interested" in preventing her from running for president in 2027. "I understood that well," she said.

Writing on X on Wednesday, Jordan Bardella — Le Pen's successor as leader of the RN — said the "the public prosecutor's office is not about justice, it's about persecution and revenge against Marine Le Pen".

'Unprecedented' fraud

The nine-week trial is scheduled to finish on 27 November, with a verdict expected to be announced in early 2025. Defence lawyers are to speak in the next couple of weeks.

Le Pen was runner-up to President Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, and her party’s electoral support has grown in recent years.

Prosecutors also requested a guilty verdict for all other co-defendants, including various sentences of up to one year in prison and a €2million fine for the party.

Prosecutor Louise Neyton said the judicial investigation has shown that the alleged fraudulent acts "are unprecedented because of their scope, duration and because of their organized, automatic and systemic nature." She denounced “the serious and lasting damage these facts and this behaviour have caused to the democratic game."

Le Pen has focused her energy in recent weeks fighting what she claims are unfair accusations. She denies accusations she was at the head of "a system" meant to siphon off EU parliament money to the benefit of her party, which she led from 2011 to 2021.

Confused explanations

Le Pen’s co-defendants — most of whom owe her their political or professional career — testified under her close watch.

Some of the aides provided embarrassed and confused explanations, faced with the lack of evidence their work was in relation with the EU parliament.

Le Pen insisted the party "never had the slightest remonstrance from the Parliament" until a 2015 alert raised by Martin Schulz, then-president of the EU body, to French authorities about possible fraudulent use of EU funds by members of the National Front.

"Let’s go back in time. The rules either didn’t exist or were much more flexible," she said.

Le Pen feared the court would draw wrong conclusions from the party’s ordinary practices she said were legitimate. "It’s unfair," she repeated. “When one is convinced that tomato means cocaine, the whole grocery list becomes suspicious!"

The president of the court, Bénédicte de Perthuis, said no matter what political issues may be at stake, the court was to stick to a legal reasoning.

“In the end, the only question that matters ... is to determine, based on the body of evidence, whether parliamentary aides worked for the MEP they were attached to or for the National Rally,” de Perthuis said.

Patrick Maisonneuve, lawyer for the European Parliament, said the cost of the suspected embezzlement is estimated at €4.5 million. "In the past few weeks, it has appeared very clearly that the fraud is, I think, largely established," he told reporters on Tuesday.