The National Front (FN), now National Rally (RN), is accused of having been a “transmission belt” of Russian power, according to the conclusions of the commission of inquiry into foreign interference, parliamentary sources told Agence France-Presse.
Extracts from the report, written by MP Constance Le Grip (Renaissance), leaked Thursday on RMC and Mediapart. The editor insists on the FN’s “alignment” with the “Russian discourse” at the time of the “illegal annexation” of Crimea in 2014, the year in which the party took out 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 the chairman of the commission, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, voted against the report, adopted by eleven votes to five, according to a parliamentary source.
Marine Le Pen denounces a “political trial”
Insubordinate France abstained. The report shows “at least a guilty casualness” of the RN with regard to Russia, but it is not “exhaustive” on the influence of other states in France, estimated the rebellious Aurélien Saintoul.
At a press conference in Pas-de-Calais, Marine Le Pen brushed aside the findings, which she compared to “a political trial”. “There is nothing, in fact,” she continued, saying the report was “in the image of the rapporteur, that is to say bigoted, dishonest and completely politicized” . “This report is a judgment on the political positions I may have taken,” she said.
The far-right leader was auditioned last week by this commission. Under oath, she 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, the president of the RN deputies had let go that she “considered that, freely, the inhabitants of Crimea had expressed themselves by voting to be attached to Russia”.
On Thursday, Ms. Le Pen said she “came out of this commission with the feeling of the collapse of democratic culture”. 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 libel and slander has yet been built, because the All of the authorities who were interviewed said there was nothing.”
After the leak of extracts from the report, MP Julien Bayou (Europe Ecologie-Les Verts) spoke of “a fiasco” which “comes back into 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”, for his part commented on his colleague Sacha Houlié (Renaissance).