The debates quickly turned into direct confrontation.
At the National Assembly on Tuesday, Marine Le Pen accused Emmanuel Macron of “posing an existential risk” to the French by evoking the hypothesis of sending Western troops to Ukraine.
“There is reason to wonder if Vladimir Putin's troops are not already in our country,” replied Prime Minister Gabriel Attal without delay, directly targeting the National Rally MP and her party.
These accusations of proximity to Russian power are frequent for the far-right party, which regularly denounces a “cabal” against it and always tries to forget several rapprochements with the Kremlin over the last decade.
Starting with a loan taken out from a Russian-Czech bank in 2014, since it went into liquidation.
The RN has since claimed to have fully repaid this loan, and above all assures that it has never been indebted to Russia for this financing.
“He tried to free himself as quickly as possible from this Russian plaster which continues to stick to him,” points out Jean-Yves Camus, political scientist specializing in the far right and director of the Observatory of Political Radicalities at the Jean Jaurès Foundation.
But without convincing his opponents: “You talk to your banker when you talk about Russia,” Emmanuel Macron had already told Marine Le Pen during the between-rounds of the 2022 presidential election.
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