The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen and over 20 other people went on trial in Paris on Monday on charges that they embezzled funds from the European Parliament between 2004 and 2016.
The trial, which is scheduled to last two months, is an unwelcome distraction for Ms. Le Pen, who will have to spend time in court at a time when her party has acquired immense political sway in France following last summer’s parliamentary elections.
The accusations that the party illegally used several million euros in European funds for unrelated partisan expenses have been known for nearly a decade, but they have done little to hobble the National Rally’s rise as a xenophobic, nationalist party.
A conviction could deal a severe blow to Ms. Le Pen’s political ambitions as she prepares her fourth presidential run, in 2027. It could also derail her efforts to bring her party further into the mainstream, although it is unlikely to weaken its current power in the lower house of Parliament.
Ms. Le Pen, who was a European lawmaker from 2004 to 2017, is charged with embezzlement and complicity in embezzlement. She faces up to 10 years in prison, a maximum fine of 1 million euros, about $1.12 million, and could be barred from public office for up to a decade if convicted.
“I don’t think that this can kill the party,” said Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, noting that French voters are currently focused on the country’s ballooning debt and deficit, possible tax increases, and immigration policy.
But making Ms. Le Pen ineligible for future legislative or presidential elections, he added, “would hit like a ton of bricks.”
The trial will seek to establish whether Ms. Le Pen and others flouted E.U. rules by using lawmaker assistants who were paid with funds provided by the bloc but who worked on tasks for the party instead. At the time, the party was still known as the National Front.
Prosecutors will argue that the party created a centralized scheme, led by Ms. Le Pen, to embezzle E.U. funds through what they say were essentially no-show jobs.
Ms. Le Pen has denied any wrongdoing, contending that lawmaker assistants are not direct employees of the European Parliament but aides to politicians, so it is appropriate for them to perform party-related work.
“I’m going into this trial with a great deal of serenity,” Ms. Le Pen told reporters upon arriving at the courthouse on Monday. “We have many arguments to develop in order to defend what I believe to be parliamentary freedom.”
“We did not break any rules,” she added.
A verdict is not expected until early next year, and Ms. Le Pen is almost certain to appeal if she is convicted, which could prolong the legal case for several years but could temporarily stave off the threat of ineligibility.
Twenty-six other people have been accused, mostly on embezzlement charges. They include current and former officials, like Wallerand de Saint-Just, the former party treasurer; former European Parliament representatives, like Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, 96, the party’s longtime leader, who was later pushed aside; as well as former parliamentary assistants or associates.
Jordan Bardella, a protégé of Ms. Le Pen who has replaced her as the party president, is not on trial. But the newspaper Libération recently reported that Mr. Bardella, who was an assistant for a National Front lawmaker in 2015, had helped falsify documents to cover up a similar scheme. Mr. Bardella has denied the accusations.
The trial comes a time when the National Rally has found itself in the position of arbiter in France’s lower house of Parliament, between a tenuous coalition of centrists and conservatives that put together a new cabinet, and a left-wing alliance resolutely opposed to it.
The National Rally and its allies have 142 seats — enough to keep the cabinet on its toes by threatening to tip the scales in a no-confidence vote.
Experts say it is too early to tell whether the trial will harm the party’s yearslong effort to normalize itself in the eyes of the French electorate. But Mr. Camus, the far-right expert, said it would do little to upset the party’s base.
“Many National Rally voters see the E.U. as a nuisance,” he said. “To them, using the European Parliament’s money for French politics is like playing a good trick.”
The National Rally is not the only French organization that has been accused of misusing European Parliament funds to pay for party work.
The MoDem, a centrist party whose leader, François Bayrou, is a close ally of President Emmanuel Macron, was found guilty of doing so in February, although Mr. Bayrou was cleared.
France Unbowed, a hard-line left-wing party opposed to Mr. Macron, has been the target of an investigation over similar accusations, but no one has been formally charged and it is unclear if a trial will be held in that case.
But the allegations of a scheme involving Ms. Le Pen and her party are on a much bigger and systematic scale than in those cases, prosecutors say.
An investigation was first opened in 2015, after the European Parliament’s president at the time warned French prosecutors about what he believed was a fraudulent use of its funding by the National Front.
Prosecutors say that investigators quickly established that there were “anomalies and inconsistencies in the employment conditions” of the assistants, some of whom were technically employed full-time by National Front members of the European Parliament but barely set foot in the building.
The party was in a precarious financial situation at the time. According to the European Parliament, the National Front was at one point paying assistants to its 23 lawmakers about 6.6 million euros in European funds — a sum that was double the party’s total staffing expenses in France.
When prosecutors recommended charges against Ms. Le Pen and others last year, they quoted a 2014 email from Mr. Saint-Just, the former treasurer, telling Ms. Le Pen that “we will only make it if we make significant savings through the European Parliament.”
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