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French authorities raided the headquarters of the far-right National Rally (RN) on Wednesday as part of a probe into alleged campaign finance violations, with the party’s president Jordan Bardella calling the action “a new harassment campaign”.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said the investigation is examining whether the RN financed its campaigns in part through illegal loans between 2020 and 2024.
The probe relates to possible money laundering and the use of forged documents during the RN’s 2022 French presidential campaign, the country’s legislative elections that year and the European elections in 2024, according to the office.
There have been no charges, and the probe is ongoing, prosecutors said.
In a post on X, Bardella said armed officers and court officials had raided the party’s Paris office on Wednesday morning and seized emails, documents and accounting data.
“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,” wrote Bardella, who said he was unaware of “the basis of this action”.
“This spectacular and unprecedented operation … is clearly part of a new harassment campaign,” Bardella added. “It’s a serious attack on pluralism and democratic transition. An opposition party has never suffered such persecution under the Fifth Republic.”
Former party treasurer Wallerand de Saint-Just told reporters outside the headquarters: “We did nothing wrong”.
The RN has surged in popularity in recent years and become France’s largest single parliamentary party, but has been kept out of government by a coalition of mainstream political forces following a snap election called by President Emmanuel Macron last year.
Wednesday’s raid comes about three months after the party’s co-founder and de facto leader Marine Le Pen and other RN members were convicted of embezzling European Union funds. The ruling banned three-time presidential candidate Le Pen from office for five years, and could therefore prevent her from running in France’s 2027 election.
Le Pen is appealing against the verdict and the Paris Court of Appeal is set to issue a ruling by next summer. Separately, she asked the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday to step in and demand that France lift the ban on running for office.
In a different probe, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office on Tuesday said it was investigating the alleged misuse of €4.3 million in EU funds by Identity and Democracy, a now-defunct far-right group in the European Parliament that included the RN.
