Paris (France) (AFP) – François Bayrou will be decided on his fate on December 17 in his appeal trial in the case of the assistants of MEPs, where the prosecution requested two years of suspended imprisonment against the former Prime Minister, acquitted at first instance.

Published on: 02/10/2026 - 17:06

“If we have not found proof, it is because there is no system, no offense,” declared the former Prime Minister on Friday afternoon in a final speech at the conclusion of a trial which opened on September 9 before the Paris Court of Appeal.

It is “a very moving moment because it is the last minute of the last hearing of a prosecution which has been extremely difficult to live with”, he underlined.

The centrist leader as well as around ten executives of the MoDem and its ancestor the UDF are suspected of having, between 2005 and 2017, had their MEPs hire assistants - paid by the European Parliament - but who only worked for the sole benefit of the party.

In addition to the prison sentence, the two representatives of the prosecution had demanded against François Bayrou a fine of 50,000 euros and three years of suspended ineligibility.

During their indictment lasting almost five hours on Monday, the attorneys general had certainly warned the court that "you will not find traces" of orders given by François Bayrou, "but there are a series of clues".

"You won't find any traces? I say, you won't find any proof," quipped Friday morning one of the defenders of the MoDem boss, Me Pierre Cornut-Gentille.

“As long as it is not proven that it was at the instigation of François Bayrou, you cannot find him guilty,” like the first instance judges who recognized his innocence two years ago, he insisted.

“The emptiness of your requisitions raises only one question: the absence of tangible evidence,” pressed another defense lawyer, Mr. Mario Stasi, asking: “the absence of evidence, is it not simply proof of the absence of an offense?”

“Toxic Train”

The final arguments of the defense all vehemently attacked the prosecution, which had notably demanded a fine of 100,000 euros each against the MoDem and the UDF.

It was first of all the thesis of a "system" that the criminal court in the first instance had itself dismissed, which was pointed out, to the point of mockery: "The +system+ experienced its little death, so we moved on to the +systemic+, and now the +repeated acts+: if we extended our debates by a week, would we not move from repeated acts to isolated acts and, from two weeks, from isolated acts to the absence of acts?" quipped Me Pierre Casanova, another lawyer for François Bayrou.

The case, born in 2017 after a denunciation by a Lepénist MEP, was built on “storytelling”, the defense lawyers further denounced, “whistleblowers who took control of the locomotive of a toxic train”.

In their sights, an assistant who has meanwhile left for the office of the socialist Anne Hidalgo at Paris town hall or the former presidential candidate Corinne Lepage, who suddenly broke with the MoDem. In short: all political opponents.

While the prosecution had highlighted the financial profit that the party was able to derive from the disputed allocation of assistant contracts - the European Parliament estimates its damage at 300,000 euros -, Me Casanova recalled: "The sums at stake represent less than 0.37% of the UDF-MoDem budget over this period".

Therefore, for Me Stasi, "we have demonstrated that these two pillars of the accusation, the 'system' and the (alleged) financial difficulties, do not exist: when under a roof, there is no longer a wall, the accusation collapses".

Before his colleague Mr. Francis Teitgen draws the conclusions, legal and political: "It is not the alleged attack that the parties could have made on democracy which is serious, but to damage the honor of a political family and, in doing so, to fuel the 'All rotten' which, in turn, undermines democracy".

© 2026 AFP

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