Political donations in France swerve to the right
as Le Pen’s niece raises more than Macron
Marion Maréchal’s Reconquête received nine times more
donations than Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, analysis reveals
Quarter of political donations in EU go to extremist
and populist parties, data reveals
Only seven EU countries require parties to reveal
identity of all private donors
Lisa
O'Carroll, Carmen Aguilar García and Pamela Duncan
Thu 30 May
2024 00.00 EDT
Political
funding in France has swerved to the right, with private donations to the small
nationalist group backed by Marine Le Pen’s niece overtaking those raised by
President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party.
Reconquête
received €5.5m (£4.7m) from private donors in 2022, the year Macron secured a
second term after a final round showdown against Le Pen, analysis by the
Guardian of the annual reports of the 15 main French parties shows.
The figure
was nine times more than the €604,000 taken by Le Pen’s National Rally (RN),
and comfortably ahead of the €3.7m Macron’s Renaissance party secured from
private backers that year.
The
findings come from Transparency Gap, a project involving the Guardian and 25
other media partners, coordinated by the investigative journalism platform
Follow the Money and published before next month’s European parliament
elections. The team gathered and analysed more than 200 financial reports
published by European political parties between 2019 and 2022, the most recent
year for which full data is available.
Founded in
November 2021 by the former journalist and pundit Éric Zemmour, Reconquête has
garnered a following among some of France’s wealthy elites – and been joined by
Le Pen’s niece. Marion Maréchal, who dropped Le Pen from her name after a rift
with her aunt in 2018, defected to the fledgling party. Maréchal is now leading
Reconquête’s European election campaign.
In total
Reconquête secured 22% of all non-public money in France – only marginally more
than Renaissance, giving it €14.2m from a range of private sources including
membership fees, donations by party candidates and officials and other income
streams like fundraising events.
The term
non-public excludes state funding, which many EU countries provide for their
political parties.
Macron’s
Renaissance secured €13.8m in non-public funding, and RN just €4.2m.
French law
guarantees privacy to all donors, meaning the public has no right to know which
private interests are financing their elected representatives.
However, a
leak published by the investigations website Mediapart in 2022 found Reconquête
had secured what were described as “colossal” sums from industrialists,
bankers, high-flying lawyers and management consultants at a series of glitzy
fundraising dinners. Backers include Chantal Bolloré, the sister of the
billionaire businessman and media owner Vincent Bolloré.
At the time
Chantal Bolloré, who sits on the board of directors of the family group, told
Mediapart she did not remember how much she contributed. “ I think it’s
€1,000,” she said. Contacted by the Guardian, her representatives declined to
comment further.
Reconquête
also turbo-boosted its finances through membership fees, and data suggested it
collected €5.7m, well ahead of the €630,000 gathered by Renaissance and four
times the €1.5m gathered by RN. According to Reconquête, by early 2022 it had
recruited 25,000 members, 75% of whom donated up to €150 each.
Samuel
Lafont, the director of digital strategy and fundraising for Reconquête, put
the party’s success down to three things: a novelty factor; a massive drive for
donations; and membership.
“We asked
people to make membership donations. It may seem usual in the Anglo-Saxon world
but for most parties in France, this is often a foreign idea,” he said.
“Most
political parties in France don’t have people who are competent in fundraising.
Technically we were also much better on the internet, on marketing and
fundraising, and that makes a notable difference, so much so that the competing
parties have since copied us.”
The arrival
of Zemmour’s party on the political scene at the end of 2021, and his push for
the presidency, caused huge disruption to the political landscape in France. A
proponent of hardline anti-Islam and anti-immigration views, as well as the
promoter of the far-right “great replacement” theory, Zemmour has been
convicted on multiple occasions over hate speech.
Ultimately,
the donations jackpot did not deliver him the presidency and Maréchal in recent
weeks has appeared open to forging a new alliance with RN, which is top of the
polling predictions for the European elections at 31% share of the vote
compared with Reconquête’s 7%.
Reconquête
has only one seat in the European parliament but is hoping to increase that to
five or six in June and flex its muscle in the rightwing European Conservatives
and Reformists (ECR) political group, which surprised many when it opened its
door to the far-right party’s one MEP in Brussels in February.
The
prospect of Zemmour increasing his power in the alliance poses a challenge for
the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who may have to rely
on ECR to win enough votes for a second term.
ECR is also
home to Giorgia Meloni’s party Brothers of Italy, Poland’s Law and Justice
(PiS) and Spain’s Vox.
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