French far-right Front National party’s links with the United Arab Emirates

WithWith six months to go before the first round of next year’s presidential elections, France’s far-right Front National party is actively seeking funds from abroad for its campaign behind party leader Marine Le Pen.

“We’re looking worldwide, everywhere except in France given the refusal of the banks here,” said Bernard Monot, one of the party’s European Parliament members (MEP), and who is involved in the search for funds. “We’ve thrown a dozen or so lines into the water which we can activate. We’re looking in the West, dollar zone and euro zone, we’ve also got possibilities in the Middle East,” he told Mediapart.

“Why not in the Middle East?” asked the party’s treasurer, Wallerand de Saint-Just, in a recent interview with French TV channel France 3 on the subject of where it might find financing. Meanwhile, Jean-Michel Dubois, the finance director for the presidential campaign of Marine Le Pen, cautioned: “There are perhaps countries that offer us [funding], but it’s us who decide,” he said. “The decision doesn’t belong to me, but we want a country that is in keeping with our values.”

One such potential backer is the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with which the party has already had dealings. In 2014, the Front National (FN) had begun exploring the possibility of receiving funding from a bank in Abu Dhabi, capital of UAE, but the negotiations foundered at the last minute. Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, another of the FN’s MEPs, told Mediapart last year that the party had been discussing a lending rate of 2.8% with the UAE bank, but that the deal collapsed “on the day of the signature in February 2014”.

The far-right party subsequently secured a loan of 9 million euros from a Russian lender (the First Czech Russian Bank) in September 2014. It had earlier, in April 2014, obtained financing for its European Parliament election campaign via another Russian loan of 2 million euros made out to the ‘micro party’ set up by Marine Le Pen’s father, the founder and former leader of the FN, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Since then, Marine Le Pen has made a number of public statements in support of the UAE authorities. On September 30th 2014, she told the Arabic service of French international news channel FRANCE 24 (see video below) that “France must end its relations with Qatar and Saudi Arabia which have aided, assisted and financed Islamist fundamentalists the world over”, adding that instead there should be “a large coalition” with “the Muslim countries that fight against fundamentalists”, citing the UAE and Egypt.

In 2015, during the FN’s traditional yearly public rally on May 1st, she declared: “Let’s develop relations with countries that combat Islamism – Russia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, among others.” She repeated the same call in subsequent interviews with Europe 1 radio (on May 3rd) and BFMTV (on June 14th).

For the FN shares a common enemy with the UAE and Egypt, namely the Islamic militants, and notably the Muslim Brotherhood, which Le Pen has described as “the matrix of all Sunni Muslim extremism” and “the trunk of a complicated tree whose branches open out onto terrorist movements”. While the FN leader argues for an alliance with Russia – she is an ardent supporter of President Vladimir Putin – against “Islamic fundamentalists”, her declarations also correspond with a rapprochement with the UAE, which has developed in two stages.

The French newsletter Intelligence Online, which specialises in news about the world of intelligence services, reported in February 2016   that a high-ranking member of the UAE’s intelligence service held a secret meeting at the private residence of the Le Pen family, a mansion house called Montretout which sits in the leafy hillside Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud. Mediapart has learnt that the meeting was held on July 20th 2014, in one of the residence’s outhouses, shortly before Marine Le Pen left on her summer holidays. That day, at about 5 p.m., a UAE embassy car parked in front of the gate of the mansion’s annexe which was where the FN then had her living quarters (she moved house from the residence three months later). The meeting lasted an hour.  

“The point of departure was this meeting at Montretout,” said a person close to Marine Le Pen, and whose name is withheld, in an interview with Mediapart. “It was a first contact. The Emirates’ representative explained that they wanted to help the Front National against Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood. That if she [Marine Le Pen] came to power, she casts off Qatar and works with them, who present themselves as ‘nice Muslims’ who combat Islamic fundamentalism. He told her ‘We will help you for your presidential [campaign]’, without detailing things. The ultimate goal was the financing of Marine Le Pen’s presidential campaign. At that time, she wasn’t expecting it. She was quite under stress during that meeting, ill at ease because it’s a world that she doesn’t know about and she was on her guard. She was more concentrated on lashing out at Qatar, enemy of the United Arab Emirates.”

The second stage came in May 2015, when Marine Le Pen made her first official visit to a Middle East country. On May 28th, she flew to Egypt for a four-day visit and met in Cairo with political and religious leaders, including then-prime minister Ibrahim Mahlab, the Grand imam of the al-Azhar mosque and a prominent Sunni Islam figure, Ahmed al-Tayeb, and also Theodore II, the Orthodox ‘Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa’. Le Pen even took part in a Coptic mass.

She was accompanied on her trip by her cabinet director, Nicolas Lesage, the FN MEP Aymeric Chauprade – who was her international affairs advisor before he left the party in November 2015 – and Pascal Renouard de Vallière, a consultant with close connections in the Middle East, and notably Egypt. The visit itself was organised by Chauprade with the help of Renouard de Vallière.

A journalist from the French Right-leaning weekly Valeurs Actuelles was present during the visit, and his "exclusive" report, with photos of meetings, appeared in the magazine in early June. The reporter sat through Le Pen’s 45-minute meeting with the Egyptian prime minister who he quoted as telling her “I have followed you for a long time, I have a lot of respect for you and the Front National. At the end of the talks, according to Valeurs Actuelles, Mahlab declared: “I count on the Front National to encourage us.”

In a statement it issued on Le Pen’s visit issued on May 29th 2015, the Front National said that it was made “to demonstrate her support for [Egyptian] President Sisi in his unfailing combat against the Islamists”. After she arrived back in France, Le Pen organised a press conference (see video below) during which she said her visit had been “extremely fruitful”. She declared that it was time “to smash this opaque window that others have placed between the Arabic-Muslim world and the Front National”, and to “lay the bases of a revival of a great French Arab and Mediterranean policy”. She paid tribute to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, “a courageous man” and “one of our most solid ramparts against the Muslim Brotherhood”, while taking a swipe at Qatar.

But both the Front National and Valeurs Actuelles omitted to mention a confidential meeting Le Pen held in Cairo, and which was reported by Intelligence Online, with Major General Khaled Fawzi, head of Egypt’s General Intelligence Directorate. According to the newsletter, it was “under the friendly pressure of the Emirates' intelligence services that most [of Le Pen’s hosts] accepted to meet with the FN president”. According to their book published in France on October 20th, entitled Nos très chers émirs (Our Very Dear Emirs), French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot recount that le Pen also met with president Sisi during an hour and a half.

Intelligence Online reported that the UAE had “entirely” and “secretly” paid for Le Pen’s visit to Egypt, which was confirmed to Mediapart by one of her close entourage. “The trip was financed by the United arab Emirates,” he said. The UAE is an ally of Egypt, and its most important foreign investor. In March 2015, UAE Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum publicly announced that his country had decided to provide Egypt with 13 billion euros in development aid, and pledged a further aid package of 3.7 billion euros.

Until now, Marine Le Pen has never denied the 2014 meeting she hosted at the family residence Montretout, near Paris, nor has she denied the reports that the UAE funded her visit to Egypt. She failed to reply to Mediapart’s request for an interview on the subject. The head of the FNs press and public relations service, Alain Vizier, said he was not aware of the issue, adding “but we inform you that the United Arab Emirates fights against religious fundamentalism, unlike Qatar”.

A similar answer was given to Mediapart by Le Pen’s cabinet director, Nicolas Lesage. “I have no information on these subjects, I don’t know at all,” he said. However, he insisted that during the meeting at Montretout, “no representative of the United Arab Emirates has offered financing to Marine Le Pen”.

“On the other hand, Marine Le Pen holds this country, which with Egypt fights against Islamist fundamentalism, in high esteem,” added Lesage.

Pascal Renouard de Vallière, who confirmed he had “accompanied Marine Le Pen in Egypt”, told Mediapart he had “no idea” how the trip was funded. “Ask Marine Le Pen,” he said.

The 55-year-old businessman, who describes himself as an “advisor in international relations”, was until 2012 a member of Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party (now renamed Les Républicains), and notably a member of its Premier cercle (First circle) club of wealthy donators. In May 2011, he received the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest award of civil merit, from then-president Sarkozy’s higher education minister, Valérie Pécresse.

Following the presidential elections that same month and the victory over Sarkozy of socialist candidate François Hollande, Renouard de Vallière left the UMP party and took his distance with the political world. “Politics is a lot of manipulation, lots of disappointments,” he says now.

He said it was “five years ago” when he first met with Marine Le Pen. “She’s a woman who I like very much,” he told Mediapart. “She is friendly, she has heart, she has lots of courage given everything that’s happening in the world, the problems tied to the economy, immigration, security, terrorism. I’m ‘cocorico’ [patriotic], so what she says touches me. She’s Joan of Arc. Today, there’s war everywhere, it’s not the France that we knew, that of our ancestors.”

On his website are photos of some of what he describes as his “VIP” and “diplomacy” contacts. On October 5th this year he attended a party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of  the weekly Valeurs actuelles, where he was seen with marine Le Pen, her cabinet director Nicolas Lesage and the party’s vice-president Florian Philippot, which he said was “quite by chance”, insisting that he does not “work” with her. “I am not political, I’m not a member of the Front National, the rest is my private life,” he said. “In my job, one meets lots of politicians, one exchanges visiting cards, you meet again.” Asked if he had accompanied le Pen on other trips, he replied: “I’d have liked to, but no.”

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• The original French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Graham Tearse