The National Front, now National Rally, is accused of having been a “transmission belt” of Russian power in the report of the commission of inquiry into foreign interference, parliamentary sources told Agence France-Presse, confirming extracts revealed by RMC and Mediapart. The report, written by Renaissance MP Constance Le Grip, leaked on Thursday. He insists on the FN’s “alignment” with “Russian discourse” at the time of the “illegal annexation” of Crimea in 2014, months after negotiating a loan from a Czech-Russian bank.
It was the RN which had launched this parliamentary commission of inquiry, supposed to defuse the regular accusations on the subject. Lepenist elected officials, including committee chairman Jean-Philippe Tanguy, voted against the report, adopted by 11 votes to 5, according to a parliamentary source. LFI abstained. The report shows “a minimum of culpable casualness” of the RN with regard to Russia, but it is not “exhaustive” on the influence of other states in France, estimated the Insoumis Aurélien Saintoul.
Under oath, Marine Le Pen had challenged any political counterpart in exchange for the Russian loan contracted by the former National Front, while she had refused to condemn the annexation of Crimea by Russia a few months later.
“I categorically dispute that I made any decision to please anyone,” she explained, arguing that “whether or not a loan came in did not change one iota the opinions that were ours forever.” On the merits, “I considered that, freely, the inhabitants of Crimea had expressed themselves by voting to be attached to Russia”, had dropped the president of the RN deputies.
On Thursday, she felt that her political opponents “reproach [the RN] for thinking differently” from them, saying that “the report barely talks about the loan on which the whole campaign of defamation and slander has yet been built, because that all of the authorities who were questioned indicated that there was nothing”.
After the leak of the extracts from the report, the deputy EELV Julien Bayou evoked “a fiasco” which “returns in the teeth” of the RN. “The commission overwhelms the Le Pen clan: it is only justice for these salon patriots, accomplices of the enemies of the Republic,” commented his Renaissance colleague Sacha Houlié.
