Marine Le Pen to sue alleged neo-Nazis who appeared on video with her father before trial

PARIS — Marine Le Pen plans to sue a purported neo-Nazi rock group after its members appeared on video with her elderly father over the weekend.

The video, which was first obtained and shared French investigative outlet Mediapart, surfaced on Monday, the first day of an embezzlement trial that could derail Le Pen’s presidential ambitions. The video appears to shows 96-year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front, and members of the Lyon-based band Match Retour at the elder Le Pen’s home west of Paris, Mediapart reported.

Match Retour is, according to Mediapart, associated with the a British white supremacist group named Blood & Honour. The U.S.-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremists, calls the group a “shadowy international coalition of racist skinhead gangs.” The group’s French branch was outlawed in 2019.

The National Front’s successor, the National Rally, said in a statement obtained by POLITICO that it would file a formal complaint against Match Retour’s members for taking advantage of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s diminishing health.

Jean-Marie Le Pen had been repeatedly convicted of inciting racial hatred and is notorious in France for downplaying the Holocaust. Marine Le Pen, who took the reins from her father in 2011, expelled him from the party four years later over his anti-Semitic comments.

Both father and daughter are among the 27 individuals associated with the National Rally that went on trial on Monday on accusations that they employed a scheme to award contracts for parliamentary assistants to individuals who mostly worked on party operations rather than European Union affairs in violation of EU rules. 

Marine Le Pen has denied wrongdoing. Jean-Marie Le Pen will be absent from the trial and has been placed under legal protection due to his declining health.

Victor Goury-Laffont contributed to this report.