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"Enormous explosives for the western world" - Le Pen still has massive debts in Russia

2022-04-24T06:51:26.709Z


"Enormous explosives for the western world" - Le Pen still has massive debts in Russia Created: 04/24/2022, 08:49 By: Klaus Rimpel Close ties to Moscow: Vladimir Putin in 2017 with right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen. © AFP PHOTO / SPUTNIK / Mikhail KLIMENTYEV France is going into the run-off election to decide the presidential question. If challenger Marine Le Pen wins against the incumbent, E


"Enormous explosives for the western world" - Le Pen still has massive debts in Russia

Created: 04/24/2022, 08:49

By: Klaus Rimpel

Close ties to Moscow: Vladimir Putin in 2017 with right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen. © AFP PHOTO / SPUTNIK / Mikhail KLIMENTYEV

France is going into the run-off election to decide the presidential question.

If challenger Marine Le Pen wins against the incumbent, Europe is threatened with a turning point.

Munich/Paris - The polls put Emmanuel Macron ahead of his challenger Marine Le Pen. But the EU governments are still looking at this election Sunday in France with great concern - after all, the pollsters predicted neither the British yes to Brexit nor Donald Trump's election victory.

And in France, the situation before this presidential election is quite comparable to that in the USA: the divide between the rural and urban population is huge.

The French in the provinces feel forgotten and left behind by "those in Paris" - and blame Macron for this.

While Le Pen's voters are extremely motivated in hopes of a change of power, Macron's electoral fatigue could prove fatal.

Anyone who doesn't want Le Pen or Macron, and there are many of them, stays at home on Sunday.

For the warlord Vladimir Putin, a victory for the right-wing populist would be a triumph: "There is enormous potential for the Western world in this election," said EU expert Ronja Kempin on the ZDF program "Markus Lanz".


France and the EU: Le Pen's victory would cool relations with Berlin and Co

President Marine Le Pen would go to Brussels as the first official act – to show that, unlike her predecessors, she is terminating her special relationship with Berlin.

At the same time, she would inform the EU that France's payments to Brussels would be massively reduced.

"And the next thing she would do is go to NATO headquarters and say: We're withdrawing the French soldiers from Eastern and Central Europe, we're no longer taking over the spearhead of NATO's rapid reaction force," says France expert Kempin.

After all, Paris would veto Sweden and Finland if they wanted to join NATO.

According to Kempin, Macron failed to score with Le Pen's proximity to Vladimir Putin in the election campaign.

Rather, the head of the Rassemblement National stands for the hope of many French people to get closer to Russia after the end of the Ukraine war.

According to 53-year-old Le Pen, this is in France's interest to prevent a Russian-Chinese alliance. The right-wing populist speaks out against sanctions against Russia because they could damage the French economy.

In the case of arms deliveries to Ukraine, she would refrain from using heavy weapons so as not to make France a party to the war.

France election: Le Pen allegedly massively indebted to Russian banks

For Le Pen's critics, all of these arguments are linked to the fact that her party is massively indebted to Russian banks.

Her party took out loans from Russian-Czech lenders in 2014 and now from Hungarian financiers because she couldn't find another bank in Europe, Le Pen defends. Her party had a loan in 2014 from Prague-based First Czech-Russian Bank of nine million euros.


According to Le Pen's critics, the Kremlin has bought into French politics.

The oligarch Gennady Timchenko, a close confidant of Putin, was in the sphere of influence of this bank, which went bankrupt two years later.

After France's party laws banned loans from non-EU countries, the Rassemblement National drew 10.6 million euros for the current election campaign from a Hungarian bank.

Le Pen does not want to reveal the name of the Hungarian financial institution due to a "confidentiality clause".

Your critics therefore again suspect Russian lenders behind the loan.


"You depend on Russia, on Monsieur Putin," Macron threw at Le Pen during the TV duel on Wednesday.

“A few months after you recognized the annexation of Crimea, you took out a loan from a Kremlin-affiliated Russian bank.

You talk to your banker when you talk about Russia.”

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2022-04-24

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