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Despite their legal troubles, Le Pen and the RN still hold a powerful position in France's current turbulent political scene.
The last thing far-right leader Marine Le Pen needed was another legal firestorm for her party, the Rassemblement National. Police officers raided the party's headquarters and office on Wednesday in an investigation into allegations that she illegally financed recent campaigns by borrowing from supporters to circumvent legal limits on donations.
The new investigation adds to the turmoil surrounding Le Pen, a three-time presidential candidate and one of France's most popular politicians. The initial blow came in March when she was convicted of embezzling EU funds and sentenced to a five-year ban from elections, which would derail her plans to run again in 2027.
She claims her innocence and is appealing, but the decision has implicitly damaged her undisputed leadership of the far right, as her right-winger and party leader, Jordan Bardella, will run in her place if she is unable to. Le Pen’s mental state was revealed in an interview late last month, in which journalists from the conservative magazine Valeurs actuelles asked her about the embarrassment both she and Bardella felt about preparing to run to replace President Emmanuel Macron in 2027.
"Of course the situation is not ideal. But what would you like me to do? To kill myself before I get killed?" she said.
Such pessimistic remarks are a change from last year when the RN was posting a sharp rise in the polls ahead of snap elections, confidently predicting it would win the prime minister's office. The party fell far behind in last July's polls after campaign setbacks and an alliance between its left-wing and centrist opponents.
The Republican Party is still performing strongly in the polls, as the popularity of its two leaders has remained stable and its base remains strong at a third of the electorate. But the latest vote also raised questions about whether the Republican Party and Le Pen have reached a limit after years of rising vote share and therefore whether they can ever secure a majority of voters to win the Elysee Palace.
Senior members of the RN reject the idea that Le Pen and the party are going through a bad period.
"Don't think we are in a crisis. All these legal cases show that the establishment is panicking that we are going to take power. Le Pen is not wavering either. She is a fighter and considers legal battles as part of the political battle ," Philippe Olivier, a member of the European Parliament and Marine Le Pen's brother-in-law, told the Financial Times.
The RN has responded strongly to the police raids, with Bardella accusing her political opponents of being on a witch hunt. The French campaign regulator had reviewed and approved all of her campaign accounts up to 2023, he said, and the loans from supporters were legal.
"We are witnessing a political operation aimed not only at destabilizing the Republicans, but also at preventing them from running in the elections and, clearly, destroying them financially," Bardella told BFMTV.
Analysts say the fiery rhetoric could damage the RN's ambition to take power because it returns the party to the anti-establishment, populist mode that Le Pen has tried to overcome to win voters' trust.
She has spent a decade trying to “detoxify” the party founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, arguing that its racist and xenophobic roots were in the past. Under the so-called “tie strategy,” the party’s deputies always wear suits and avoid the noise of a hung parliament. The RN has been on a roll in the National Assembly, where it had 8 seats in 2017, then 89 in 2022 and 123 after snap elections in 2024, becoming the single largest party.
But recent media reports have undermined the detox campaign. The online portal Les Jours revealed that party officials participated in a public Facebook group created to support Bardella, in which anti-Semitic comments were added, while Mediapart said that a close ally of Le Pen and the MP regularly wrote racist and homophobic articles in magazines.
“The proliferation of these investigations calls into question their normalization, makes them look unprofessional and will make it more difficult to win the presidency ,” said Luc Rouban, a research director at Sciences Po who has written books on RN.
The RN has had chronic difficulties securing loans from French banks, so it has asked supporters to participate in so-called "patriotic lending schemes" by contributing a minimum of 500 euros to be reimbursed later with interest. Prosecutors are now examining whether these loans constituted disguised donations, for example when they were not repaid within a five-year period.
Loans from supporters are not illegal, as long as their use is not “habitual” and does not exceed 15,000 euros. Donations face strict limits: individuals can only donate 7,500 euros per year to a political party and 4,600 euros per election to a candidate.
Despite their legal troubles, Le Pen and the RN still hold a powerful position in France's current turbulent political scene.
Macron has no majority in parliament and his first prime minister since snap elections was quickly ousted. The current prime minister, François Bayrou, remains vulnerable to another no-confidence vote and the Republicans are a key vote to determine his survival.
Le Pen will have a chance to unseat Bayrou during the autumn budget debate, which the prime minister has warned will include unpopular spending cuts. Bayrou has pledged to start cleaning up France's public finances, which are in shambles, with a deficit of 5.8 percent of GDP by the end of 2024.
RN officials have already told Bayrou that they do not want to see tax increases or cuts to benefits, such as for retirees.
“ It’s a dilemma for Le Pen. If she topples the Bayrou government, there is a strong risk of snap parliamentary elections in which she cannot run to keep her seat in the assembly. But she has set red lines on taxes and spending that Bayrou cannot easily respect, and it would anger the party and its electoral base if she backed down ,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia group.
Bardella's rising popularity is also not without consequences for Le Pen. Le Pen has in the past described the pair as a "ticket" with her as president and him as prime minister, but her persuasion enabled him to move forward.
Cracks have emerged in the party, with the so-called Marines increasingly suspicious of Bardella's supporters, although officials publicly insist there are no tensions. " The Le Pen family no longer has full control of the party ," Rouban said. /Adapted from "Pamphlet" by "FinancialTimes"
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