French far-right leader Marine Le Pen denied any “Russian tropism” before the National Assembly on Wednesday, affirming that she would never have signed the loan her party had taken in Russia had it been the slightest political opponent.
“If it committed me to anything, I wouldn’t have signed it,” assured Marine Le Pen. “This 9.4 million euro loan that was taken out from a Czech-Russian bank in 2014 and is still being repaid,” assured Marine Le pen
“I’m signing a loan with a bank, I’m not signing a loan with Vladimir Putin,” the Russian president hammered out at the unsuccessful candidate in the second round of presidential elections against Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and 2022 during a four-hour hearing before the parliamentary commission of inquiry into foreign interference.
Opponents accuse his Rassemblement National (RN) party, the first opposition formation in the National Assembly since the 2022 general election, of being an agent of Russian influence in France.
This parliamentary commission of inquiry into interference from abroad was set up by the RN parliamentary group in parliament at the end of 2022 to eliminate precisely this suspicion. The other parties denounce a “distraction”.
The far-right leader insisted on the critical financial situation her party was in at the time and her difficulties in finding a European creditor.
“It was this or death” of the party, then calling itself the Front National (FN), she said.
As to whether this vital support weighed on frontline leaders’ support for Russia after the 2014 invasion of Crimea, “the fact that a loan came in or not didn’t change one iota of the opinion we had forever,” she said.
After defending the annexation of Crimea and calling for the lifting of international sanctions against Moscow in 2017, she has changed stance since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which she describes as “aggression”.
Amidst the fire of questions from MPs, Ms Le Pen, who was received at the Kremlin just days before the 2017 presidential election, affirmed that she “never” spoke to Vladimir Putin or the other Russian politicians she met about this loan.
She indicated that if elected in 2027, she would ban foreign lending to political groups. She also advocated the creation of a “democracy bank” to help parties fund their election campaigns, a recurring idea, even in the majority, but one that Emmanuel Macron never pursued.
The conclusions of this commission of inquiry are expected in early June.