The story of France's National Rally in the spring of 2026 is a story about legal exposure accumulating faster than political leads can be maintained. Three simultaneous crises are converging on the party that most polls give a 2027 first-round victory.
The European Public Prosecutor's Office in Luxembourg has opened a formal investigation into suspected fraud against the EU's financial interests, targeting an arrangement that dates to 2020.
That year, the Identity and Democracy group at the European Parliament — the multinational bloc that houses the RN and similar parties across Europe — launched a tender for a media coaching contract. The contract went to Kon Tiki Conseil, the firm of Pascal Humeau, a former TV presenter. There was an immediate procedural irregularity: the tender required three years of operating history, a criterion Humeau's firm did not meet. A competing firm did. The tender deadline was reportedly extended to accommodate Humeau's application.
What followed matters more than the tender irregularity. From September 2021, Humeau — paid roughly €133,300 from the European Parliament budget to train Identity and Democracy MEPs on European affairs — instead met Bardella 26 times to prepare him for Marine Le Pen's 2022 French presidential campaign. EU rules explicitly prohibit European funds from financing national political campaigns.
Humeau reportedly described Bardella as a "coquille vide" — an empty shell — before the sessions began. After them, Bardella became one of the most polished communicators in French politics, winning the RN presidency in November 2022 with 85% of the membership vote.
Bardella denies all wrongdoing. The RN told AFP that he "naturally denies these accusations levelled against him in the current political climate, and reserves the right to take legal action for defamation and slander." The party says the coaching sessions were conducted in compliance with European Parliament rules and were suspended when the presidential campaign began.
If convicted under the French Penal Code, Bardella faces up to ten years in prison, a fine of up to €1 million, and mandatory ineligibility for public office for up to 10 years — which would rule him out of the 2027 presidential race entirely.
The plan was straightforward: if Le Pen lost her appeal in the parliamentary assistants case, Bardella would step up and run. Every poll gave him a strong first-round result.
On 7 July, an appeals court will rule on Le Pen's conviction. The lower court found her guilty of misappropriating EU funds and imposed a sentence that includes ineligibility for office. An upheld conviction means she cannot run in 2027.
With Bardella now himself under formal EPPO investigation, the RN faces the prospect of both its top candidates being legally barred from the presidential ballot — a scenario that would blow the race wide open and fundamentally alter the calculation for centrist and left-wing candidates alike.
The Bardella probe fits a broader pattern. In July 2025, the EPPO opened a separate investigation into the Identity and Democracy group over €4.3 million in irregular communications spending. The RN and 25 of its officials were also convicted in the parliamentary assistants case — the same case in which Le Pen is now appealing.
Adding financial pressure: the party cannot find a European lender for a €10.7 million pre-election loan. The RN treasurer told Bloomberg the party had reached out to every French bank and received only rejections or silence.
The pattern is not new. In 2022, the party navigated a similar situation by turning to a bank in Hungary with links to Viktor Orbán. The question now is whether it will need to do so again — and what that implies for a party already navigating questions about its independence from non-EU political actors.
Three crises in parallel — a fraud investigation into its president, a potential bar on its founder and figurehead, and a pre-election loan that no mainstream European bank will touch — paint a picture of a party that leads every poll but may not be able to put a candidate on the ballot. If 7 July bars Le Pen and the EPPO investigation deepens against Bardella, the 2027 French presidential race, currently one of the most predictable in recent memory, becomes one of the most open. That would matter not just for France but for the future trajectory of European far-right politics — and for the EU institutions that have become, in different ways, entangled in the RN's troubles.
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