Who cares that she was found guilty of embezzling European Parliament funds, illicitly siphoning EU money to pay for party employees who can barely point to Brussels or Strasbourg on a map? People voted for Le Pen because she is the Robin Hood of modern-day Europe, stealing from the rich institutions and reinvesting in her national political interest.
It hardly matters that those funds come from EU countries, that those countries make money by collecting taxes from their citizens and that, therefore, those former MEPs, including Le Pen, improperly used EU citizens’ money.
Marine Le Pen was personally responsible for €474,000 (of €4 million) in this case. To put that in perspective, if Declassified’s maths is correct — it rarely is — that amounts to €17,555 for each member state. The average price of a European pizza is around €13 (Brussels did not get the memo), so that’s roughly 11,396 pizzas per country, which, frankly, should be reimbursed. (Eds: Is this whole thing about pizzas necessary? No. But pizzas make any story better.)
But again, that’s all irrelevant. The truth is, we’re all Marine.
Not because of the taking from the bureaucrats to give to the poor(ish). Nor because we all had a holocaust-denying father who has been haunting our careers from the start (at least not all of us).
We’re all Marine because, deep down, we all want to cheat the system somehow. And when they catch us, instead of owning up to our mistakes, we storm out of the room, walking past everyone without saying a word. We throw a tantrum. In the end, we’re all big, loud toddlers.
And now that the enfante prodige has been punished and might be out of the limelight for a while, we don’t know who to look up to.
La Reine is (politically) dead, long live … Barbie Bardella?
