The former president of the National Front (now National Assembly), Jean-Marie Le Pen, said goodbye Tuesday to the European Parliament, where he was elected 35 years, denouncing his "uselessness" and comparing him to a "windmill" ". "The memory I take away from this house is a little bit of uselessness," the 90-year-old MEP told reporters a few hours before speaking one last time. in the hemicycle.
"I will not miss my colleagues"
"Here we are in a windmill, and like the miller of Alphonse Daudet, we would only cart sandbags in our wheelbarrow instead of sacks of wheat, to make an illusion," added Jean-Marie Le Pen. , who chaired the FN for nearly 40 years, but was expelled in 2015 after polemical comments on the Holocaust. As a result, he concluded, "I will not miss my homework or my colleagues".
For him, "the EU is a straitjacket that paralyzes political activity (...) against a danger: the surge of migration that is consecutive to the world's population explosion". His best memory, he said, was the European election of June 1984, which brought his party "out of the dark" by crossing for the first time in France the bar of 10%.
Suspicions of fictitious jobs
The MEP denounced the "swindle" of the European Parliament, which "extorted 320,000 euros under a very questionable legal pretext". The FN is accused by the French justice to have set up in the Strasbourg Parliament a "diversion system", for his benefit, the remuneration of his parliamentary assistants. Targeted by procedures for recovery of these supposedly fictitious jobs, Jean-Marie Le Pen must repay to Parliament 320,000 euros.
Jean-Marie Le Pen did not exclude an exit from France of the EU "at the end of the course, if it is not possible to (the) profoundly change" from the inside, as now hopes its Marine Le Pen, president of the RN. He predicted "a very good score" to the RN list, especially as Emmanuel Macron "made the gift of presenting the fight as a duel between him and Marine Le Pen". In the fire that ravaged Notre-Dame de Paris, he saw "a sign" of the "threats weighing" on France and hailed "an ancestral place of worship, very directly involved in the identity of France ".