EU Parliament refuses to pay Jordan Bardella’s chief of staff as a parliamentary assistant

The embezzlement trial threatening Marine Le Pen with a ban from running for public office is not deterring her far-right Rassemblement National (RN) from relying on what got them into trouble in the first place: European Parliament funds intended for parliamentary assistants. The party’s president, Jordan Bardella, who is also a member of the European Parliament, attempted to have his chief of staff recruited as a local parliamentary assistant. In November, the Parliament rejected the hiring, as revealed by The Chained Duck on December 4. Nine other far-right MEPs elected in July faced similar refusals.

The European Parliament’s letter to Bardella, which The World has obtained, mentions the risk that “the Union’s resources (…) might be used for purposes other than those for which they are intended, in particular for the benefit of a political movement.” The RN president was astonished: His chief of staff was already paid as a local parliamentary assistant during the previous European mandate, and evidence of his work in this area was provided. Unlike Brussels-based assistants, local parliamentary assistants are paid directly by the MEP. They are supposed to help the elected representative explain their work as an MEP in their constituency, in this case, France.

François Paradol, 37, has been Bardella’s right-hand man since the latter’s first political activist meetings in the 2010s. A long-standing employee of e-Politic, the RN’s communications service provider, he manages his small team of collaborators at the party’s Paris headquarters. Other responsibilities include his position as regional adviser for the Ile-de-France region, where his attendance is far more frequent than Bardella’s, his seat on the board of directors of Ile-de-France Mobilités, the regional public transport agency, and his unpaid role as president of the RN financing association. Since 2020, he has also been a local parliamentary assistant to Bardella, who was first elected to the European Parliament in 2019. It was when the party’s president wanted to renew Paradol’s contract, after his re-election, that he came up against the institution’s refusal.

‘There’s nothing problematic’

According to the European Parliament’s response, Bardella requested a 21.5-hour per week contract for his close associate, for a gross monthly salary of €1,815, raising the total remuneration of his chief of staff to €6,027 monthly gross. The European Parliament’s letter states that “given [his] responsibilities as president of the RN and in view of the remuneration paid by the RN to Paradol, it would appear that Paradol’s duties as ‘assistant to the RN president’ go beyond simple administrative support and represent more than [part-time work amounting to one-third of his working hours].”

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