Le Pen’s Far-Right Party “Mouthpiece,” “Communication Channel” for the Kremlin: French Parliament Report

The report analyzes what it describes as Le Pen’s “alignment” with “Russian discourse” at the time of Moscow’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. It was shortly after Le Pen endorsed Russia’s annexation of Crimea that the National Front received $11.5 million in loans from a Russia bank close to the Kremlin. 

The report says: “All of [Le Pen’s] comments on Crimea, reiterated during her inquiry hearing, repeat word for word the official language of Putin’s regime.” The report notes that the NR had strongly and publicly objected to the decision by then-president François Hollande to cancel the sale of two Mistral helicopter carriers to Russia because of the invasion of Crimea.

The report notes that as part of the NR’s attempt to move to the center ahead of the 2022 presidential and parliamentary elections, and in the wake of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the party’s pro-Russian stance “softened.” The report notes that Le Pen and her party had “unambiguously condemned” Russian aggression, even though they did not change their support for Russian annexation of Crimea.

Le Pen’s efforts to distance herself from Moscow were part of a more general trend to make the RN more acceptable to mainstream voters. Among other thing, she expelled her father – an unabashed racist and anti-Semite – from the party, along with several lower-level party officials who were openly supporting Holocaust denial. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, brought more scrutiny of the RN’s links to Russia, even though the party, after an initial hesitation, condemned the invasion.

Her election rival, incumbent president Emanuel Macron, effectively used the RN’s Russia ties against her. In a widely watched president debate ahead of the 24 April 2022 run-off, Macron launched a ferocious attack on Le Pen, accusing her of, in effect, being on the Kremlin’s payroll owing to the fact that her party received millions of dollars from a Kremlin-controlled Russian bank.

In a pivotal moment in the debate, Macron, who was a successful investment banker before entering politics, told Le Pen: “I’m taking to you now as a banker, not as president. And as banker, let me tell you: When you speak to Russia, you are not speaking to any foreign leader, you are talking to your banker.” To drive home the point, Macron repeated his words: “Vous parlez à votre banquier quand vous parlez de la Russie, c’est ça le problème madame Le Pen” (You are talking to your banker when you talk to Russia, and that is the problem, Mrs. Le Pen).

Macron argued that the RN’s loan from a Russian bank with links to the Kremlin made her “dependent on Vladimir Putin” and incapable of “defending French interests.”  

The controversial loan was also in the spotlight during her confrontational, acrimonious 4-hour testimony last week before the investigative committee.

The RN continues to struggle with its pro-Russia positions, and the party’s parliamentary delegation pushed for the investigation in order to show that the party’s ties to Russia were not as close as people think, and that, in any event, other parties also had close ties with other countries.

Among the witnesses was Francois Fillon, the former Gaullist prime minister (2007-2012) who was asked about his lucrative contracts as an adviser to two Russian oil companies – one of them state-owned. Fillon, who became a consultant to the Russian companies after he quit politics in 2017, resigned both position on 25 February 2022, a day after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.

Fillon insisted that he “never took a single cent of Russian money.”  

The director of DGSI, France’s internal security agency, testified behind closed doors that French lawmakers of all parties were prime targets of Russian intelligence.

The problem for the RN was that the investigative committee, chaired by a member of the RN, could not find any political party or lawmakers with anything even remotely similar to the sheer scope of the RN’s ties with Russia, or any political party whose positions dove tailed so closely with the positions of a foreign power, even if those positions contradict and undermine French interests and values.

“The inquiry’s immediate political consequence is to highlight, once again, Marine Le Pen’s pro-Russian stance – particularly on the annexation of Crimea,” Le Monde wrot last Friday. 

Reflecting on the fact that the RN instigated the investigation, Greens’ lawmaker Julien Bayou observed: “The [National Rally] launched this inquiry to clear its name, but ended up with a boomerang in the face.”