A former head of the European Union’s border control agency, Frontex, has announced that he will stand as a lead candidate for France’s far-right Rassemblement National party, the former Front National, in this year’s European Parliament elections.
Fabrice Leggeri, 55, a senior French civil servant, was executive director of Frontex from 2015 to 2022. In an interview with French weekly Le Journal du dimanche, published at the weekend, he said he will stand in third position on the Rassemblement National’s list of candidates for seats in the parliament, led by the anti-immigration party’s chairman Jordan Bardella.
At a domestic level, the June elections are billed in France as a test of strength between the Rassemblement National (RN) and President Emmanuel Macron’s centre-right Renaissance party. More importantly, at a continent-wide level, studies suggest that rising popularity of far-right and Eurosceptic parties – found in a recent opinion survey to top voting intentions in France and eight other European Union (EU) member states – could see a populist rightwing coalition form a majority within the European Parliament.
As part of its attempts to throw off the boorish image of its origins, the Front National, and widen its electorate through a supposedly credible and respectable political programme, notably its hard line on immigration, the RN will be hoping Leggeri’s career will impress; a graduate of two of France’s elite grandes écoles, the École Nationale de l’Administration (ENA), and the École Normale Supérieur (ENS), Leggeri has spent most of his career at the interior ministry. He became head of Frontex in 2015, on the proposition of then socialist interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who subsequently awarded him France’s national order of merit.
However, Leggeri was forced to resign his position at Frontex in April 2022, amid a year-long investigation by the EU anti-fraud agency OLAF into Frontex’s alleged involvement in, and covering up of, illegal pushbacks of boats of migrants trying to enter EU waters, and connected violations of human rights.
“Pushbacks” are when migrant boats making clandestine crossings, in this case most frequently in the Mediterranean region, are intercepted and forcibly returned to the open sea or to where they came from. The practice is illegal under both EU and international law.
The allegations over Frontex’s involvement in pushbacks had also been the subject of media investigations, notably those coordinated by the collaborative journalism platform Lighthouse Reports together with leading European media. Leggeri’s resignation from Frontex came one day after the publication of one of those investigations.
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Before that, Leggeri had publicly argued for the beefing up of measures against illegal immigration. In an August 2018 interview with French regional press group Ebra, he called for an increase in expulsions of illegal migrants, without which "we won't resolve the migrant problem". He said that unless expulsions were stepped up, “you send an implicit message to potential migrants: try at any price to get to Europe, because even if you're picked up, you have every chance of staying there".
Former boss of Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri was pushed into resigning, dropped by Emmanuel Macron because he took action against the submersion of Europe.
In his interview published this weekend in the Journal du dimanche, Leggeri launched into an attack against the European Commission and “Eurocrats”.
“The RN has a concrete plan and the capacity to carry it out,” he said. “We are determined to combat the migratory submersion [sic] which the European Commission and the Eurocrats do not consider to be a problem but, rather, a project. I can vouch for that.”
“My aim is to place my experience and my expertise at the service of the French [people],” he added. “Having led Frontex for close to seven years, and worked for the state for about 30 years, notably in the fields of security and the management of immigration, this decision [to stand for the RN] is very coherent.”
“In reality,” he said of his resignation from Frontex, “I was placed under pressure and I felt a general abandonment. The French government pressed me to resign. Germany was little inclined to support me. The European Commission, manifestly hostile towards me, wanted my departure.”
Timed alongside the interview, RN chairman Jordan Bardella took to X (the former Twitter) to post the claim that “former boss of Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri was pushed into resigning, dropped by Emmanuel Macron because he took action against the submersion of Europe”.
Legerri's resignation in advance of OLAF's damning report
Fabrice Leggeri’s resignation followed long-mounting criticism of his management of Frontex (including lavish spending on social events for staff). In December 2020, the European Commission’s director-general for migration and home affairs, Monique Pariat, wrote to Leggeri with a sharp reminder that Frontex had not launched a recruitment programme, as it was obliged to have done by then, for the appointment of a “fundamental rights” director to oversee the agency’s upholding of migrants rights, and of 40 fundamental rights officers in the field. In 2021 and again in 2022, the European Parliament refused to validate the accounts of Frontex because of its alleged cover-up of pushbacks.
But it was the investigation by OLAF, the EU anti-fraud agency, that finally triggered his resignation months before its findings were published in a report in October 2022. OLAF found that Frontex was involved in illegal pushbacks of migrants from Greece to Turkey, in violation of their human rights, and that Frontex senior management committed “serious misconduct and other irregularities” in not investigating – and even covering up – such incidents.
The version of OLAF’s report that was made public was redacted, and the personal names of those implicated were removed. By resigning in advance of the report (along with his chief of staff, Thibaud de La Haye Jousselin), Leggeri avoided a formal disciplinary procedure.
It’s because we love Europe that we refuse that our continent becomes Africa’s hotel.
According to French rolling TV news channel BFMTV, which cited an OLAF document dated May 2023, the anti-fraud agency also investigated Leggeri’s personal management style and found he had been guilty of “abuse of power” and bad behaviour, notably towards three Frontex staff, including its deputy executive director.
“Concerning these accusations, it is important to note that neither the European Parliament nor the board of Frontex found concrete proof to substantiate them,” Leggeri said in his interview with the Journal du Dimanche this weekend.
In a May 2022 interview with French daily Le Figaro he declared: “I was personally confronted with these accusations and I could refute all of them.” He said his detractors wanted to transform Frontex into a “humanitarian agency” to check on “how the member states apply fundamental rights”.
On Sunday, RN figurehead Marine Le Pen, leader of the RN parliamentary group, also welcomed Leggeri’s decision to stand as candidate for her party. She told French TV news channel LCI: “It’s very interesting to have someone who has had these responsibilities, who can tell the French what’s going on from the inside, and can show what we have been saying since a long time – for the EU, immigration is not a problem, it’s a project.”
She said that while Leggeri had tried to make Frontex “a European coastguard agency” he was forced to resign because he came up against “an ideology of welcoming migrants”. Her party has previously dismissed Frontex as a “reception hostess” for “anarchic immigration”.
At a press conference in January, RN chairman Jordan Bardella referred to the European Parliament elections in June, saying that they “must constitute a veritable referendum on migratory submersion”. One month earlier, meeting with other far-right allies in the Italian city of Florence, he described immigration as an “existential” issue. “It’s because we love Europe that we refuse that our continent becomes Africa’s hotel,” he declared.
On his LinkedIn page, Leggeri presents himself as a civil servant on unpaid leave. On his X (former Twitter) social media account, which is newly created, he has relayed publications by RN and Bardella. Leggeri was due to join the latter on Monday in a visit to Menton, in south-east France, to meet with a police unit, the CRS 8, specialised in fighting drug trafficking and urban violence, while also visiting the local border post with Italy.
Recent opinion surveys in France place the RN list of candidates in the lead for the forthcoming European Parliament elections, hovering at around 30 percent of voting intentions, about a third more than for Macron’s Renaissance party. Meanwhile, opinion polls currently place Marine Le Pen, daughter of Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, as garnering the most votes in the first round of the next presidential elections, due in 2027.
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- The French version of this report can be found here.
This lightly abridged English version by Graham Tearse