\n<\/p>\n
When I interviewed Jean-Marie Le Pen in Marseille at a party rally during his fifth presidential campaign in 2007, he told me with pride how he had started the Front National with other colonial army veterans who had failed to keep Algeria French, and former Third Reich conscripts who had fought for Hitler. Le Pen, a convicted racist and Holocaust denier who died last year at the age of 96, was less forthcoming on the torture he carried out during the Battle of Algiers, though he was happy to discuss the street violence in which he claimed to have lost an eye and the bombing of his apartment in Paris by unknown perpetrators in 1976.<\/p>\n
His daughter Marine was eight years old at the time of the attack. She took over the FN from her father in 2011 and later renamed it the Rassemblement National (RN, or National Rally). She too has been extremely combative whenever I\u2019ve interviewed her, as you\u2019d expect from someone who has driven her party through multiple scandals while apparently trying to detoxify it. She has partly succeeded, making it to the second round of the last two French presidential elections, and seeing her party become the largest in the National Assembly.<\/p>\n
The hollowness of the RN revolution became clear this week, however, when Le Pen announced she would be standing again to become France\u2019s head of state, despite a criminal conviction for embezzlement being upheld. Three judges sitting at the Paris Court of Appeal concluded that she had indeed stolen millions from the European Parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg. Rather than using EU funds to pay assistants to MEPs, including herself and her father, Le Pen illegally diverted the money back to party headquarters in Paris.<\/p>\n
Such corruption took place over a period of at least a decade, the court heard, and at a time when Le Pen was regularly speaking out against the financial sleaze that characterised the Paris establishment. In a TV interview with Public S\u00e9nat in 2013, she asked: \u2018When will we implement a lifetime ban on holding office for anyone convicted of offences committed thanks to their mandate or while in office?\u2019<\/p>\n