Prosecution accuses Le Pen of devising system to embezzle EU parliament money 'to run' far-right RN

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00:00Well for more on this story we're joined now by Andrew Smith of Queen Mary

00:04University of London. He specialises in French politics and is a friend of the

00:09programme. Welcome again Andrew, good to have you with us. Can I first ask, we were

00:16hearing earlier from our reporter at the court today that Marine Le Pen is

00:19looking really downbeat as though she's expecting the worst. Can you give us an

00:26idea of the trial and what her defence arguments were? Absolutely, well it's

00:33been a very long trial. Of course the prosecution has been laying out their

00:40accusations and Marine Le Pen has been present for the whole thing, you know, she

00:44has some legal training. She sat there very prominently at the front

00:49throughout, you know, tutting away and gesticulating and making it clear when

00:53she disagrees and, you know, trotting over to confer with lawyers and all the

00:57rest. She's been a very visible presence waiting at the the front of the trial.

01:01Now what's really been said is that the contention is not simply that the

01:07accusation alleged is that this is not simply the emploi fictif, the fake

01:12jobs, that was seen kind of prosecuted in French government before, but

01:17actually there is a whole system behind this and that's really what this hinges

01:21on, what the prosecution are really going after her for. She is at the head

01:26of the party, there has been, they accuse, a system by which, you know, they have

01:31essentially been milking European parliamentary money to run a French

01:35political party and that is at the heart of this contention, that they have all

01:40these so-called parliamentary aides but they're not actually doing any work to

01:43help the European deputies. In fact they are just working for the party back in

01:49France. Now what's Marine Le Pen said? Well she said first of all, she said well I'm

01:53not the HR director, how can you claim this? It's all, you know, they don't count

01:57for everyone's hours and all the rest of it, but the key of her defense has been

02:01really around this idea of mutualization as she called it and she talks about how

02:05when the National Front then, now the National Rally, went from three

02:11European deputies to over 20 and essentially they were all brand new, they

02:16all needed a bit of help and so they sort of just pooled resources and they

02:20were doing a bit of work between all and they weren't necessarily that great at

02:23keeping their records. That's her contention, there was no system and

02:26behind all of this. But it's been a really difficult one and I think there

02:30will be some very difficult moments to come when the defence starts to make its

02:35case and just in the days and weeks to come. Now she said she is a lawyer and

02:40she's made a couple of comments, she'd suggested that justice in the court was

02:45I think she used a word that we could probably translate as shaky, suggesting

02:52that she didn't have a lot of faith in the French justice system. What is she

02:56doing by saying that? Are we heading into Trump territory with that kind of a

03:01comment? Well I think we're maybe not, I wouldn't rule it out is what I would say.

03:07What she's tried to do is she said well you know we sent thousands of emails,

03:10there's thousands of hours of all this and you've only picked out a couple that

03:13are incriminating. But in reality that's all it takes to make a case and there

03:18are clear signs from Valéry Saint-Just, of course he was the party treasurer for

03:23many years, another lawyer, that there was kind of something bad afoot

03:28and there seemed to be signs that some MEPs said look this looks like fake jobs,

03:32is that right? Of course he said Marine knows all about it. He said he was just

03:36dismissing the claim and Marine Le Pen says well I didn't know, I didn't know

03:39these things. It seems like she is trying to make this case that actually you know

03:42this is maybe the either the monitoring that's at fault or the state is at fault.

03:47There's a suggestion that they might drag up the Jérôme Kerviel case from way

03:51back in 2008. He was the trader that lost Société Générale, the bank, billions

03:56of euros. But there is perhaps a failure in systems and monitoring and actually

04:01the reason that's being pursued, she claims, is to kind of get at her

04:04politically. However it's worth stating this all relates to laws that came in in

04:092016, anti-corruption laws and what the prosecution are asking for is not an

04:14option in terms of the actual sentencing and all the rest of it. That's what the

04:18law demands as part of this type of trial, part of this type of

04:23conviction. So if that were to be made that's very much what the justices would

04:27have to look for I think. What do you think the political impact would be if

04:33she were banned? 11 million people voted in the last parliamentary elections for

04:37her party. While she's disliked by many she is hugely popular by many other

04:43people here in France. What would be the impact? As you said, we've seen a

04:48long process of the de-defectivization or the kind of detoxification perhaps

04:53of the far-right that's been going on over previous years and she personally

04:57has tried to soften her image. You can forget the last presidential run, all the

05:01photos of her with her cats looking nice and friendly and all the rest of it.

05:04She's seen to be a sort of old hand at this and will very much fancy her chances in the

05:09next presidential election.

05:11Now, that also casts us back to the last one, and really, that question of what impact it

05:16will have is about how much those votes for the national rally were votes against President

05:22Macron or votes for Marine Le Pen.

05:25You might well say she has an able deputy in the young Jordan Bardella, of course, who

05:30is at the head of the party nominally, and he might well be a ready-made replacement.

05:34It would be hugely personally distortive in terms of the party because the Le Pens have

05:39been so central to everything that the party has done.

05:42Now, it is something that will shake up the far-right's politics, but it may also enrage

05:48people that they might see this as being injustice by the ruling elite, as it were, pushing back

05:55against an opposition leader.

05:57It depends how the national rally play this, but I think one thing's for sure, they're

06:00unlikely to go quietly, they're unlikely to accept things as they come, and that's going

06:04to start very much when the defence goes on the attack in these days to come.

06:08Okay, well, we'll have to leave it there.

06:10Thank you very much.

06:11Andrew Smith there speaking to us from London.

06:14Thank you for sharing your ideas with us there, Andrew.

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