French police raid far-right National Rally headquarters in finance probe

PARIS (AP) — French police raided the headquarters of far-right party National Rally on Wednesday and seized documents and accounting records, the party’s leader said, as part of a sweeping campaign finance inquiry.

Prosecutors said they are investigating allegations of illegal financing of longtime party leader Marine Le Pen’s 2022 presidential bid, and the party’s European Parliament and French parliamentary campaigns. The National Rally, which seeks to sharply curtail migration and restrict Muslims’ rights, is the biggest single party in France’s lower house of parliament.

Jordan Bardella, 29, who took over the presidency of the popular party in 2022, said that police seized “all files relating to the party’s recent regional, presidential, legislative, and European campaigns — in other words, all of its electoral activity.”

Bardella slammed the raid in a message on X. “This spectacular and unprecedented operation is clearly part of a new harassment operation. It is a serious attack on pluralism and democratic change,” he said.

The raid came after Le Pen — runner-up to incumbent President Emmanuel Macron in 2022 — was convicted of embezzlement in April and barred from seeking office for five years. She and 24 other party officials were accused of having used money intended for European Union parliamentary aides to instead pay staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, violating the 27-nation bloc’s regulations.

But Wednesday’s raid stems from a different, more recent case.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement to the AP that searches were carried out at the National Rally’s headquarters, at the headquarters of unidentified companies and at the homes of people leading those companies.

The searches were prompted by a judicial inquiry opened a year ago into a raft of allegations, including fraud, money laundering and forgery, the prosecutor’s office said.

The inquiry aims to determine whether Le Pen’s 2022 presidential campaign, and the party’s campaigns for European Parliament in 2024 and French parliamentary elections in 2022, were financed by “illegal loans from individuals for the benefit of the party or National Rally candidates,” the statement said.

The inquiry is also investigating allegations that the National Rally overbilled for services or billed for fictitious services in order to artificially augment the amount of state aid provided to the party for its electoral campaigns.

The prosecutor’s office says no one has been charged in the case.

Bardella said on X that the investigation targets National Rally members who loan money to the party because banks won’t, calling the raids a ″spectacle″ serving political ends.

Former party treasurer Wallerand de Saint-Just told reporters outside the headquarters, ’’We did nothing wrong.″

Le Pen has not commented publicly.

The National Rally was born from a party with racist and antisemitic roots founded by Le Pen’s father.

In recent years, the party has broadened its messaging and seen its support rise steadily. It has longstanding ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and took out a loan from a Czech-Russian bank in 2014 because it said it could not get credit elsewhere.

Le Pen had been considered a top contender for France’s 2027 presidential election before her March conviction.

While her appeal in that case is pending, she asked the European Court of Human Rights for emergency action to suspend the ban on running for office. The court rejected her request Wednesday, arguing that there was no ‘’imminent risk of irreparable harm” to her human rights.

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Associated Press journalists Alex Turnbull and Oleg Cetinic in Paris and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.