Alexei Navalny accused French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen of maintaining ties with the Kremlin

Imprisoned Russian opponent Alexei Navalny abruptly ventured into the hard-fought French presidential campaign on Wednesday, urging voters to support President Emmanuel Macron and claiming that far-right wannabe Marine Le Pen is too closely linked to Russia.

Le Pen has already faced scrutiny in the past for a €9 million loan his party received in 2014 from First Czech-Russian Bank.

Questions about Le Pen's ties with Moscow arose during his presidential candidacy five years ago, which he lost to Macron, and reemerged amid the invasion of Ukraine ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin. She emphasized that she has condemned the February 24 invasion “unambiguously”.

The tweet by Navalny's team, hours before a final debate between the two candidates, poses a threat to Le Pen's relatively smooth progress towards Sunday's runoff against Macron.

In the debate, Macron accused Le Pen of being dependent on Russia, of which he said is “your banker”. Le Pen was annoyed by the suggestion that he is indebted to the Kremlin and pointed out that he is “totally free”. Previously in the campaign, he had dismissed questions about the loan to his Frente Nacional party, which has been renamed the National Group. Since then, the bank was dissolved.

Navalny, Putin's main domestic adversary, said in the long French-language thread that he wanted to inform Le Pen supporters about corruption in Russia and how it has contaminated banks like the FCRB.

“This bank is a well-known money-laundering agency created at the behest of Putin,” Navalny tweeted, although he did not cite any evidence other than his own investigations into corruption in Russia. “This is selling political influence to Putin.”

A 2019 study by the Washington-based Alliance for Security of Democracy at the German Marshall Fund found that the FCRB bank had been a “key mechanism for Moscow to influence political contests abroad, and how this bank sought to take advantage of existing legal loopholes in the financing campaigns to achieve their political objectives”.

The investigation focused on Le Pen's anti-immigration party, saying that the bank had been involved in being a “vehicle for large-scale money laundering of corrupt elites.” He also cited “Russian state-backed interference in the Western political system” in the form of a loan to the National Front.

Por Elaine Ganley (Associated Press)

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