It’s a well-worn story: the anti-corruption crusader who, once in office, becomes even more corrupt than his predecessor. But that simple narrative quite aptly describes the argument of a recently updated book on David Rachline — the vice president of France’s Rassemblement National party and the man once considered Marine Le Pen’s “best friend.”
Les Rapaces (The Birds of Prey) is French journalist Camille Vigogne Le Coat’s two-year-long investigation into Rachline’s management of Fréjus, the southeastern French city where the party’s vice president has served as mayor since 2014. Here, near the blingy Côte d’Azur, Rachline, who is close to both Le Pen and her protégé Jordan Bardella, reportedly perfected the art of patting the right backs and stuffing his own pockets: a system of clientelism nicknamed the “Varois Mafia,” after the southeastern department (Le Var) where Fréjus is located.
As Le Pen appeals her conviction for embezzlement of European Parliament funds, handed down last Monday by a French court, Le Coat’s book offers a window into how the far-right party allegedly organizes corruption on a local level. While the Rassemblement National — down from its leadership to its local affiliates — presents itself as an anti-system party, spared from the corruption roiling the political establishment, Le Coat argues the opposite: once in power, the Rassemblement National doesn’t just perpetuate tired corruption schemes but builds on them.
“And what if David Rachline weren’t an isolated man, a black sheep, but the symptom of a greater illness within the party?” Le Coat asks in the intro, published before Le Pen’s conviction last Monday.
Far from Brussels, where Le Pen’s party was found guilty of siphoning roughly €4 million of European Parliament funds in order to fund party activism, Le Coat suggests that the Roman town of Fréjus served as a laboratory for the far right’s…
Auteur: Phineas Rueckert
