On Wednesday, July 9th, the offices of the Rassemblement National (RN) party were searched as part of an investigation into the financing of three election campaigns between 2022 and 2024. Party president Jordan Bardella denounced what he called a politically motivated campaign of harassment.
Around 20 police officers from the financial brigade, accompanied by two investigating judges, arrived at the offices of France’s leading opposition party in the morning.
“All emails, documents and accounting records have been seized, without us knowing at this stage what the precise allegations are,” said Jordan Bardella from Strasbourg, where he was attending a plenary session of the European Parliament.
In a message posted on X, the RN president denounced a “spectacular and unprecedented” operation and “harassment,” asserting that “never has an opposition party been subjected to such relentless persecution under the Fifth Republic.”
These searches were carried out as part of a judicial investigation opened a year ago, in July 2024, at the initiative of the National Commission for Campaign Accounts and Political Financing. According to RN MP Julien Odoul, the documents seized during the search were already in the commission’s possession. However, he believes that the police intervention provided an opportunity to search Bardella’s personal office and get hold of confidential documents.
The RN is accused of illegal financing for the 2022 (presidential and legislative) and 2024 (legislative) campaigns, with charges including “aggravated money laundering,” “forgery and use of forged documents,” and “regular loans from an individual to a political party.”
The Commission’s suspicions arose from the RN’s excessive use of loans from individuals—which are highly regulated by French electoral law—more so than all other parties combined. In 2021, out of a total of 764 loans of this type for all French parties, the RN obtained 613.
The RN is not the only political party to have been subject to searches. But the term “harassment” used by Bardella is easily explained by the absurd situation in which the RN finds itself. As Jean-Yves Le Gallou, former member of the National Front (the previous name of the RN) and director of the Institut Polémia, points out:
The vicious cycle is as follows: banks refuse to lend to the RN, and the RN is faced with refusals of service from providers. Under these conditions, it manages as best it can by borrowing from individuals and turning to friendly suppliers (since the others refuse!). Then, the judges preemptively condemn these practices and conduct searches in the hope of uncovering minor offences among the tens of thousands of seized documents and emails.
The ostracism of Marine Le Pen’s party puts it in an impossible position if it wants to continue to exist and carry out its activities normally. It faces obstacles that other political groups do not face, leading to practices that the judicial system then takes great pleasure in denouncing. For Le Gallou, representative democracy presupposes freedom of action for elected officials. In the context of the RN, these conditions are clearly not met.
Abroad, the offensive against the RN has not gone unnoticed. This search comes just after the opening of an investigation into financial irregularities launched by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office against the Identity and Democracy parliamentary group, of which the RN was a member during the previous legislative term. The RN and its former ID partners are suspected of having “unduly spent” nearly €4.3 million between 2019 and 2024.
Although the two investigations are completely independent, their timing obviously fuels suspicions of political score-settling. For the time being, the party finds itself caught between two fires: how can it maintain a discourse of trust in the institutions when they are objectively doing everything in their power to destroy it?
