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French financial police have raided the headquarters of France’s far-right Rassemblement National party, seizing documents relating to recent electoral campaigns, the party’s leader Jordan Bardella said on Wednesday.
Bardella said in a post on X that about 20 armed officers of France’s financial police brigade had raided the party’s Paris office on Wednesday morning and seized emails, documents and accounting information. He said he did not know the reason.
“The entirety of the files concerning the recent regional, presidential, parliamentary and European campaigns — all the party’s electoral activity — are today in the hands of the judiciary,” Bardella said.
He said the officers were accompanied by two investigating judges.
The operation comes months after the RN’s three-time presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and other party members were found guilty of embezzling EU funds, potentially blocking her from running for office in 2027 presidential elections. She is appealing against the verdict and says she will still stand to succeed Macron.
The Paris prosecutor said the raid on Wednesday was part of an investigation that began after “multiple alerts from an institutional source” that alleged that the RN illegally financed its campaigns.
“The judicial investigation aims to determine whether these campaigns were financed through illegal loans from individuals benefiting the party or its candidates, as well as through overbilling of services or invoicing for fake services that were later included in the reimbursement requests submitted to the state for campaign expenses,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
The investigation is another blow to Le Pen and the RN, both already reeling since her embezzlement conviction. The legal woes have called into question her long uncontested role as the leader of the far-right party her father founded decades ago, and led to new fissures within it.
Le Pen and the 29-year old Bardella have both said that he would run for president if she was prevented from doing so. But their once-solid mutual loyalty is now under pressure.
On a trip to the French overseas territory of New Caledonia last month, Le Pen slapped down a question from journalists over why Bardella was not with her. “I am not sure Jordan is very familiar with the problems of New Caledonia. We have different talents,” she said with irritation.
Of the raid on Wednesday, Bardella said: “This spectacular and unprecedented operation is clearly a new [kind of] harassment. It’s a serious attack on pluralism and democratic transition. An opposition party has never suffered such persecution under the Fifth Republic.”
In recent days, media have reported that the European parliament is also investigating allegations that the RN’s parliamentary group committed wrongdoing by granting money without sufficient controls to charities and organisations that were sympathetic to its ideals. The EU parliament was at the origin of the embezzlement case that led to Le Pen’s conviction.
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