“You are looking for the little beast” | EUROtoday

Marine Le Pen defended herself step-by-step, with intact power after seven lengthy hours of interrogation – this should be the behavior of nights of parliamentary debate. She didn’t give an inch, with as a lot pleasure as authority, and the protection legal professionals solely served as meager foils. The member for Pas-de-Calais actually usually intervenes within the trial of the European assistants of the National Front (FN, which turned the National Rally in 2018), when her former collaborators drown of their contradictions. But Monday October 14, and till Wednesday, earlier than the Paris felony court docket, it’s she who’s instantly focused for “embezzlement of public funds” and he or she supposed to present her measure.

Marine Le Pen, nevertheless, is on a razor’s edge, between an offensive political protection and the necessity to justify the work of her assistants. “The European Parliament swallows up the deputies, you can sleep there, eat, go to the hairdresser, everything is done so that the elected representatives live in isolation, said the leader of the far right. Our job is to extract them from this living environment, to get them into politics. » For her, it is not possible to distinguish the president of the RN from the MEP, “in Parliament, when there were three of us, then seven, we had an Epsilonesque weight. We were left with the fact that the political word, the mandate, is also political activity.”

Same factor for parliamentary assistants, “shared”, that’s to say they labored for a number of deputies, “without the administration telling us anything”assures M^me Le Pen. However, the MP works for his get together, and his assistants for him: that is what the European Parliament accuses him of getting paid assistants who in actuality labored at his expense for the get together, which is explicitly prohibited. “I do not feel that I have committed the slightest irregularity”nevertheless, protests the MP, who sees within the trial a sneaky settling of scores by the previous social-democrat President of Parliament, Martin Schulz.

“It’s not for the party, it’s for the benefit of the party”

Mᵉ Patrick Maisonneuve, Parliament’s lawyer, reminds her that she declared, “when parliamentary assistants were not strictly occupied with parliamentary tasks, they could, at the request of their deputy, work for the party of which the deputies are all members…” Marine Le Pen “formally contests” having stated that. Bad luck, she stated it, and wrote: that is a gap assertion learn to the investigating decide. “You are on the lookout for the little beasttempts the accused, it’s not for the get together, it’s for the advantage of the get together. »

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