👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.
If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.
This week
🧑⚖️Dati asks to rejoin the judiciary ahead of her corruption trial
💰Ciotti lobbies Le Pen for capitalisation in pensions
🇺🇦Bardella trips over Ukraine position
🧑⚖️Dati asks to rejoin the judiciary ahead of her corruption trial
So, to start off the week: as Rachida Dati waits for 16 September, where she will be tried for corruption before the Paris Criminal Court on charges of corruption and passive influence peddling, she has made an interesting request.
Having not held any position as a judge or prosecutor since 2002, when she initially entered into politics as Nicolas Sarkozy’s advisor, Dati has asked to be reinstated to the judiciary
Since the request was made, the Ministry of Justice has confirmed it will do so upon resolution of her case.
“Ms Dati has requested her reinstatement as a judge, as is her right, and will shortly be assigned in accordance with the standard transparency procedure for judges … that is to say, following the advice of the High Council for the Judiciary, which the Minister for Justice will follow”
- Statement by the Chancellery of the Ministry of Justice
However, the question is whether or not she would legally be able to reintegrate into the judiciary following the corruption judgment, which is linked to her time as an MEP when she was accused of illegal lobbying for Renault and former boss/internationally wanted criminal, Carlos Ghosn, who is currently hiding out in Lebanon.
Dati was apparently even paid €900,000 through lawyers between 2009 and 2013, and you can read more about the issues here:
🇫🇷Macron to Recognise Palestine, Dati Faces Corruption Trial, and French Army Chief Steps Down
France takes a historic step on Palestine, political scandal rocks Paris, and a major change in the French armed forces - plus 50% off French Dispatch paid subscriptions this summer!
💰Ciotti lobbies Le Pen for capitalisation in pensions
Sticking with the right, Eric Ciotti used his political rentrée on Saturday 5 September, in his Nice stronghold, to pressure Marine Le Pen toward pension reform, even as he widened the gap with her over Ukraine.
Held on a field in Levens in the Alpes-Maritimes, the event drew a supposed 6,000 people, more than double the turnout of previous years, who were all fed pan-bagnats and rosé.
Several dozen local mayors attended, along with the Alpes-Maritimes department president, Charles-Ange Ginésy, all jostling to support Ciotti’s campaign and to position themselves. Leading figures of the Rassemblement National (RN) on the Côte d’Azur also attended, presumably keeping an eye on one of their main vote silos for the second round of the Presidential elections.
Especially now that he has little chance of winning a strong post following a potential Le Pen victory.
Two months ago Ciotti looked like a plausible prime minister for a Bardella presidency; however, this was all thrown up in the air by the July 7 appeals court ruling that convicted Marine Le Pen while restoring her eligibility. Ciotti suddenly found himself bumped down the pecking order, which cost him a candidate more sympathetic to his free-market instincts and a straight line to Matignon.
Ciotti hasn’t dropped the fight, however, and he continues to call for a funded, capitalisation-based pillar in the pension system, implicitly criticising Le Pen’s near-status-quo stance and the RN’s own vote to suspend the Borne reform.
“Our pension system is under threat and won’t hold up any longer (...) The deficits are widening, demographic change is here, yes we must change the system. (...) An alliance also feeds on differences: yes, I think we will need to work more, and I say it again to Marine Le Pen, we will need to introduce a dose of funded pensions for our retirement system.”
- Ciotti speaking in Nice on Saturday 5 September 2026
Ciotti’s camp continues to hope Le Pen hasn’t closed the door, with sources close to him saying he spent several hours this week discussing the issue with her directly, with plans to continue lobbying for his favoured policy. His allies in the Union des Droites pour la République argue that there’s a chance to make this happen, as Le Pen “doesn’t say, as the left does, that funded pensions will impoverish people.”
Even Menton mayor Alexandra Masson, close to Le Pen but sympathetic to Ciotti’s liberal leanings, suggested the RN platform on pensions is still unfinished: “She will flesh out [her roadmap] as the campaign goes on, give her time. There are still points on which the platform can evolve.”
Unfortunately, with Marine Le Pen currently scrambling not only to put together a policy platform that will appeal beyond the far right but also to keep her own coalition together, Ciotti may find himself hard-pressed to make this happen.
🇺🇦Bardella trips over Ukraine position
Jordan Bardella used an appearance at the Ambrosetti Forum on Lake Como, Italy, on Saturday 5 September to try to draw a line under a week of open friction with Marine Le Pen, where he ended up storming out of a meeting after saying Marine Le Pen had to choose between him and her niece, Marion Maréchal Le Pen.
He also attempted to stake out his own position on aid to Ukraine, after RN vice-president Louis Aliot called for France to “turn off the tap” on support for Kyiv, which would begin the slow death of the Ukrainian war effort.
Fortunately, Bardella did not go quite that far, but he came close, stating that the RN “support Ukraine and we will continue to support Ukraine, but what I am saying is that the goal driving us must not be to finance the war forever,” he told the forum.
He went on:
“But giving away money we no longer have, because I mean, we have 3.5 trillion euros of debt … I would like us to be able to help everyone, but the extremely serious and worrying state of French public finances means we cannot give money without any guarantee or any certainty that this money will be repaid one day. I mean, the Americans have been much smarter and much sharper than us, as usual, because the money they gave to Ukraine is secured against rare earth extraction.”
Bardella went on to argue that weapons purchases funded by European aid to Ukraine should go to manufacturers on the continent. A familiar RN talking point, building on Emmanuel Macron’s position on EU Strategic Autonomy, but with a different goal: putting up a barrier to arms transfers to Ukraine.
RN MP Laurent Jacobelli echoed the line on Franceinfo the same morning. Support for Ukraine under an RN government would not come “at the cost of France’s financial life … At a time when we are asking the French to make an effort on their pensions, on their healthcare, at a time when France is in a state of near bankruptcy, we cannot endanger our country’s future.”
Bardella did leave himself room. “Defensive military support” would continue, he said, along with humanitarian and training aid.
“If a delivery to Ukraine is compatible with France’s rearmament, we continue. When it puts our own stockpiles and our own defense at risk, obviously not. Our duty as decision-makers and political leaders is to protect France,” he said.
The policy itself deserves scrutiny beyond the budget arithmetic. Conditioning support for a country under active invasion on a guarantee of repayment can be seen as treating an ally’s survival as a commercial transaction rather than a strategic and moral commitment.
The worst part: the schizophrenic position of the Rassemblement National comes at the exact moment Russia is intensifying strikes on Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure. We also need to bear in mind that French aid committed to Kyiv is a small fraction of the €3.5 trillion debt Bardella invokes, while the RN completely ignores the issue of the pension system.
The affordability argument looks more like a pretext for dsengagement than a genuine fiscal constraint.i
Bardella’s own comparison does not hold up well either. He is right that the American package is not pure charity: it sits inside the reconstruction investment fund created under the minerals deal Washington and Kyiv signed in 2025, which gives the United States a direct stake in future revenue from Ukrainian resource licensing which was heavily criticised as abusive and opportunistic
Plus, let’s be real here: the European support Bardella casts as reckless is not the blank check he implies. The EU’s plan for a large reparations loan, backed by Russia’s frozen central bank assets, has stalled in Brussels purely due to Belgian objections. The 90 billion euro facility EU leaders agreed instead for 2026 and 2027 is explicitly structured so that Ukraine only has to repay it once Russia pays war reparations.
The guarantee Bardella says does not exist is already structured and being implemented, and is intended to make Moscow foot the bill for its crimes against humanity, not to impose a further cost on French or European taxpayers.
There is also real irony in the RN casting itself as guardian of French public money against unsecured foreign lending. The party has spent more than a decade tangled up in its own unresolved debt to Russia: a 9.4 million euro loan taken from the Moscow-based First Czech Russian Bank in 2014, whose collapse two years later saw the debt transferred to Aviazapchast, a Russian aviation parts supplier later sanctioned by the United States over its military clients.
RN says the loan has been repaid. Independent reporting on the arbitration process behind that claim has been considerably less clear. As recently as this year, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s government was reportedly working to persuade major French banks to lend Le Pen’s 2027 campaign the money instead, specifically to wean the party off financing from Moscow-linked sources and to head off accusations that the “deep state” was trying to destroy the RN.
Not only that, but the RN was recently involved in a very casual embezzlement scheme at the European Parliament that resulted in €2.9 million in damages.
Bardella closed the day with an attempt at party discipline, telling BFM-TV he retained an “unwavering political and personal affinity” with Le Pen, despite a week that exposed real gaps between them over the ban on the Islamic veil in public and over pensions, where Le Pen has settled on restoring retirement at 62 or even 60 while Bardella had floated a “new system” entirely.
“If some people expect me to be disloyal to Marine Le Pen, that’s to know me very badly,” he said, adding that he intended to “do his job” and stay “at his post.” “Because she has always been my first supporter, I will always be her first supporter.” He said he was not trying to “impose” a line on the party and wanted to get more involved in economic policy, which he called “one of the major issues of this campaign.” “When we have disagreements, we usually discuss them among ourselves.”
The Rassemblement National, a party bankrolled for a decade by Kremlin-linked money and which has engaged in serious embezzlement, is now the one arguing Ukraine cannot be trusted with a loan. Behind the talk of guarantees and debt is a simpler proposition: leave Kyiv to fend for itself, call it fiscal prudence, and let Russia murder our allies for their imperialist dreams.
Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:
And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:
