The preliminary investigation into rape and sexual assault opened against Jean Lassalle, head of the Rural Alliance list in the European elections, has been dismissed, announced the Bordeaux public prosecutor’s office on Friday March 29, confirming information from the daily South West.
“The investigations do not make it possible to establish the existence of a criminal offense,” considered the prosecution. The investigation, opened in the summer of 2023 and entrusted to the judicial police, targeted “old facts”, dating from 2010. According to Sud Ouest, the 45-year-old complainant claimed to have been raped in a hotel in Bordeaux during the campaign for the 2010 regional elections, for which the former Pyrenean MP was head of the MoDem list in Aquitaine. Jean Lassalle, 68, was heard in a free hearing in November.
Head of list of the Rural Alliance in the European elections
The Pyrenean elected official served for two decades in the National Assembly, under the label of the Union for French Democracy (UDF), then the Democratic Movement (MoDem) and finally his movement, Let’s Resist!. Mayor for forty years of the village of Lourdios-Ichère in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, champion of rurality, the two-time presidential candidate did not stand for re-election in the last legislative elections. He justified his decision by “medical imperatives”.
He became famous by singing the Béarnais anthem, Aqueros mountagnos, at the top of his lungs in 2003 in the Hemicycle, or by going on a hunger strike in 2006 for thirty-nine days in the National Assembly in a highly publicized fight. against the relocation of the Japanese Toyal factory to his canton. The atypical Béarnais MP must lead the Rural Alliance list in the European elections alongside the president of the National Federation of Hunters, Willy Schraen.
