The last thing far-right leader Marine Le Pen needed was another legal fire to break out for her Rassemblement National party.
Police officers raided the party’s headquarters and her office on Wednesday in an inquiry into allegations it illegally financed recent campaigns by borrowing from supporters to evade legal caps on donations.
The new investigation adds to the funk 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 election ban that would wreck her plans to run again in 2027.
She maintains her innocence and is appealing, but the verdict has implicitly frayed her uncontested leadership of the far-right, since her right-hand man and party chief Jordan Bardella will run in her place if she cannot.
Le Pen’s state of mind was revealed in an interview late last month in which journalists from the conservative Valeurs actuelles magazine pressed her on the awkwardness of both herself and Bardella preparing to run to replace President Emmanuel Macron in 2027.
“Of course the situation is not ideal,” she said. “But what would you have me do? That I kill myself before being assassinated?”
Such downbeat remarks are a shift from last year when the RN was riding a polling high ahead of snap elections, confidently predicting it would sweep into the premier’s office. The party fell far short in the vote last July after campaign stumbles and an alliance between its leftist and centrist opponents.
The RN is still performing strongly in the polls, since its two leaders’ popularity has held steady and its base remains solid at one-third of the electorate. But the last vote also raised questions over whether the RN and Le Pen have hit a ceiling after years of rising vote share — and hence whether it can ever clinch a majority of voters to win the Elysée palace.
Senior RN members reject the idea that Le Pen and the party are having a bad stretch.
“Do not think that we are in crisis,” Philippe Olivier, a member of European parliament and brother-in-law to Marine Le Pen, told the Financial Times. “All these legal cases show the establishment is panicking that we will take power.”
Nor is Le Pen faltering, he said: “She’s a fighter, and considers that legal fights are part of the political battle.”
The RN has hit back hard against the police raids, with Bardella charging that its political opponents were on a witch-hunt. The French campaign regulator had examined and approved all its campaign accounts through 2023, he said, and loans from supporters were legal.
“We are witnessing a political operation that aims not only to destabilise the RN, but also to prevent it from standing for elections and, clearly, to destroy it financially,” Bardella told BFMTV.
Analysts say fiery rhetoric may hurt the RN’s ambition of taking power because it puts the party back in the anti-system, populist mode that Le Pen has sought to transcend to win voters’ trust.
She has sought for a decade to “detoxify” the party her father Jean-Marie Le Pen founded, arguing that its racist and xenophobic roots were in the past.
Under the so-called “necktie strategy”, the party’s MPs always wear suits and eschew the rowdiness of the hung parliament. The RN has been on an upward march in the National Assembly, where it had 8 seats in 2017, then 89 in 2022, and 123 after 2024 snap elections, becoming the biggest single party.
But recent media reports set back the detoxification drive. Online outlet Les Jours revealed that party officials participated in a public Facebook group created to support Bardella in which antisemitic comments proliferated, while Mediapart said a close ally of Le Pen and MP regularly wrote racist and homophobic magazine stories.
“The multiplication of these investigations calls into question their normalisation, makes them look unprofessional, and will make it harder to win the presidency,” said Luc Rouban, a research director at Sciences Po who has written books on the RN.
The RN has had chronic difficulties in securing loans from French banks, so has asked supporters to take part in so-called “patriotic lending schemes” by contributing a minimum of €500 to be reimbursed later with interest. Prosecutors are now examining whether these loans amounted to disguised donations, for example when they were not paid back by a five-year deadline.
Loans from supporters are not illegal, as long as their use is not “habitual” and they do not exceed €15,000. Donations face tight limits: individuals can only donate €7,500 a year per political party, and €4,600 per election per candidate.
Despite their legal woes, Le Pen and the RN still hold a powerful position in France’s current tumultuous political scene.
Macron has no majority in parliament, and his first prime minister after the snap election was swiftly toppled. The current one, François Bayrou, remains vulnerable to another no-confidence motion, and the RN is a key swing vote to determine his survival.
Le Pen will have a window to bring down Bayrou during the autumn debate over the budget that the premier has warned will include unpopular spending cuts. Bayrou has pledged to start cleaning up French public finances, which are in disarray, with a deficit of 5.8 per cent of GDP at the end of 2024.
RN officials have already told Bayrou they do not want to see tax increases or cuts to benefits, such as to pensioners.
“It’s a dilemma for Le Pen. If she brings down the Bayrou government, there’s a strong risk of an early parliamentary election in which she cannot run to keep her own seat in the assembly,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at Eurasia group. “But she has set red lines on tax and spending which Bayrou cannot easily observe, and she would anger her party and her electoral base if she backs down.”
Bardella’s rising popularity — a recent Elabe poll showed him to be the politician with the highest favourability rating, ahead of Le Pen in third — is also not without consequences for Le Pen. Le Pen has in the past cast the pair as a “ticket” with her as president and him as prime minister, but her conviction made it possible that he will step ahead.
Fissures have emerged in the party as so-called Marinistes look more suspiciously on Bardella’s backers, although officials publicly insist there is no tension.
“The Le Pen family no longer has a complete grip on the party,” Rouban said.
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