Bardella fights to put aide on European Parliament payroll — despite Le Pen scandal

Jordan Bardella, president of France’s far-right National Rally, is turning a personnel dispute into a major fight with the European Parliament over the same rules that saw his mentor Marine Le Pen banned from running for office.

Bardella, who is a member of the Parliament, wants to hire his chief of staff for party affairs, François Paradol, to work part-time as his local assistant for his MEP work. Bardella proposed to have Paradol work Monday to Thursday, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., as a parliamentary assistant — with the rest of his time set aside for party work.

But the Parliament has twice rejected his application, claiming it would be near impossible for Paradol to separate his party work from his parliamentary work during that time, according to a letter from the Parliament Secretary-General Alessandro Chiocchetti to Bardella seen by POLITICO and first reported by French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné.

In his letter, Chiocchetti cited the recent trial of Le Pen, in which she was found guilty of embezzling Parliament funds and barred from running for French president, as a reason to block Paradol’s bid.

“Recent trials before French national jurisdictions showcased the risks related to the use of funds allocated by the European Parliament in cases where parliamentary assistants are also fulfilling a side activity for a political party,” Chiocchetti said.

“Given your responsibilities as party president, Mr. Paradol’s missions as chief of staff require a certain degree of availability and reactivity. This doesn’t seem to be quite compatible with the pace of the parliamentary assistant tasks you are considering giving him,” the letter reads.

“The accumulation of responsibilities, under your sole supervision, makes it … impossible to ensure that, while working for you as a Member of Parliament, Mr. Paradol won’t be called upon for tasks related to the presidency of the [National Rally].”

Le Pen and 23 other defendants were found guilty last month of misappropriating more than €4 million worth of Parliament funds. They were accused of using that money to pay people who were nominally MEP assistants but in fact worked mostly on party affairs.

Le Pen was handed an immediate five-year ban from running for office — a penalty that could bar her from standing in the next presidential election. The far-right figurehead has appealed the decision and continues to maintain her innocence. Bardella has since emerged as the most likely candidate of France’s largest far-right party for the 2027 presidential ballot.

Paradol told POLITICO that he had served as both a part-time local parliamentary assistant and Bardella’s chief of staff during his previous term as an MEP, which ended in 2024, and had had no problem establishing a division of labor between the two jobs. The issue only came to the fore when it was time to renew his contract over the summer, after the new Parliament was sworn in.

“For almost four years, I split my time between a part-time local assistant contract and working for Jordan Bardella’s office at the National Rally headquarters. This division of tasks was continuously validated under the previous mandate,” Paradol said.

Paradol said Bardella plans to explore avenues to contest the secretary-general’s refusal, potentially taking the matter to the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Le Pen was handed an immediate five-year ban from running for office — a penalty that could bar her from standing in the next presidential election. | Magali Cohen/AFP via Getty Images

“It’s clear from this that the European Parliament wants to further restrict our freedom to hire local assistants, to ban parliamentary staff from any political role, and more generally to turn any political staff member into a European civil servant,” Paradol added.

Le Pen’s legal team made a similar argument during her trial, though it largely fell flat in the face of the evidence presented against her and her 23 co-defendants.

Victor Goury-Laffont reported from Paris and Max Griera reported from Brussels.