Marine Le Pen guilty

[Shearwater]

Originally Posted by Skybird

The only question is whether the legal allegations are well-founded and also the evidence, or whether it's just a contrived scandal to get rid of her. I have not followed the case and refrain from commenting, I simply have no idea.[...]

Originally Posted by The Guardian

[...]The so-called fake jobs system covered parliamentary assistant contracts between 2004 and 2016, and was unprecedented in scale and duration, causing losses of €4.5m to European taxpayer funds. Assistants paid by the European parliament must work directly on Strasbourg parliamentary matters, which the judges found had not been the case. [...]

It seems well-documented and well founded. Then again, all she did was giving back taxpayer money to the taxpayers, in this case herself and her cronies.

Originally Posted by Skybird

However, the movement founded by the LePens will survive without her. It could even be that it gets specifically stronger due to this sentence today. The enemies of LePen might find out that they won a pyrrhic victory only.

Time will tell, but I'd expect that a ruling such as this won't prevent her from pulling the strings in the background. Then again, you can't forego upholding the law just because doing so makes some people go nuts.

[Dargo]

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI), argues that ‘the decision to remove an elected politician should be one of the people’. LFI writes also in a statement that although Le Pen has been convicted of ‘serious offences’, the court should not be a means of getting rid of her party in the Rassemblement National.