PARIS – A corruption watchdog on June 30 said it was seeking a probe into allegations France’s far-right presidential candidate-in-waiting Jordan Bardella once held a fake assistant job in European Parliament, claims his party denies.
A court in 2025 found the anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party’s former leader Marine Le Pen and two dozen others – including parliamentary assistants – guilty of operating a system from 2004 to 2016 to use European parliament funds to employ RN staff in France.
An appeals court is next week to decide whether to uphold a five-year electoral ban for Le Pen over the fake jobs scandal, in a landmark decision to determine whether she or her protege Bardella will run for president in 2027.
Bardella, who became RN party leader in 2022 and is a member of the European Parliament, is not a defendant in that case.
But French anti-graft group Anticor says Bardella needs account for his activity during a four-and-a-half-month stint as assistant to MEP Jean-Francois Jalkh in 2015.
It accuses Bardella and people close to him of providing forged documents to show he was working for the European lawmaker.
The RN has denied any wrongdoing on the part of its leader.
“He was never implicated in the parliamentary assistants affair,” the RN told AFP, referring to the court case involving Le Pen.
The Paris prosecutor’s office received a legal complaint from Anticor in January, accusing Bardella and six others of misappropriation of public funds and forgery, a source with knowledge of the matter told AFP, requesting anonymity because not allowed to speak to the press.
Anticor based its complaint on the work of a journalist who wrote for French daily Liberation and now works for weekly paper Le Canard Enchaine.
In 2025, Bardella lost a defamation lawsuit against Liberation, which he had brought over the headline of an article published in 2023 describing him as a “phantom parliamentary assistant”.
The investigation “indicates that party officials may have produced false documents in order to conceal the alleged embezzlement of funds, as well as the possible involvement of Jordan Bardella”, the group told AFP.
It said it was filing a new type of complaint that should mean an investigating magistrate is appointed to look into the allegations.
But the prosecutor’s office said it could not investigate anything until the case file and related sealed documents were no longer in court. AFP
