Once known for his endless speeches, Bruno Gollnisch has now toned down his rhetoric. A former close associate of historic far-right figure Jean-Marie Le Pen and ex-deputy leader of Le Pen's party, Gollnisch refrained, when speaking at the Paris appeals court on Monday, January 26, from giving one of his unending lectures on the separation of powers. Previously, he had tried to overwhelm the court with this kind of lecture in October 2024. He was set to turn 76 two days after the court date, and continued to mimic his late mentor by using carefully chosen vocabulary and, like him, overusing the imperfect subjunctive tense.
On the substance of the case, he admitted, doing so clearly for the first time in the far-right party's embezzlement trial, that his European parliamentary assistants had sometimes worked for the party "in a residual way," and not just for their MEP, as they were legally required to do. The admission was a halfway measure, as well as an attempt to avoid another conviction, after he was sentenced to three years in prison, of which two years suspended, a €50,000 fine, and a five-year ban on holding elected office, with immediate effect. Yet it was undoubtedly too much to avoid seeming to contradict himself, and too little to admit to embezzling €996,000 in public funds, which he was accused of having done.
