Bardella told French newswire Agence France-Presse after the July raid that “no French bank wanted to lend money to the National Rally to finance its election campaigns,” and that the party should therefore not be blamed for “financing itself and taking out loans that are perfectly legal.”
President Emmanuel Macron’s upstart political party faced the same problem before his shock victory in 2017, being forced to rely on fundraising to compensate for the absence of financial guarantees or a political track record that might have reassured creditors. But after he won the Elysée, banks were more comfortable with playing ball.
Renaissance, as the party is now known, was able to buy — and then sell for a reported €31 million — prime real estate in the heart of Paris for its headquarters. The National Rally, by contrast, rents far more modest offices in a building ill-befitting one of France’s most popular political parties, in an upscale but aging neighborhood on the western edge of the city.
Go fund yourself
The most notorious public instance of the National Rally’s efforts to seek alternative financing was the €6 million loan Le Pen secured from a Russian bank in 2014, which became a major political liability.
In recent years, however, the National Rally has relied on small-scale fundraising schemes, at least one of which fell foul of French campaign finance laws designed to prevent too much money from entering politics. The National Rally last year exhausted its final appeal and was definitively found guilty of having overcharged its candidates for “kits” containing campaign material, which were then reimbursed with public funds, during the 2012 legislative elections.
The July 9 raid was conducted by officers looking for evidence to support the allegation that the National Rally may have received illicit loans from supporters or financiers. While political parties in France are allowed to receive loans from individuals, those loans cannot be granted on a “regular basis,” per electoral law, so as to not serve the function of a banker without proper authorization.