A few days before the first round of the legislative elections, this Tuesday evening, Jordan Bardella was trapped on a few issues during the debate which pitted him against Manuel Bompard (New Popular Front) and Gabriel Attal (Renaissance). Among the pitfalls, the ban on sensitive jobs for dual nationals. An already fragile issue into which the National Rally president has once again plunged himself.
“You want to put a Franco-Russian at the head of a nuclear power plant?” Jordan Bardella asked Gabriel Attal. And the current Prime Minister retorted: “If this is a measure that concerns Franco-Russians in sensitive positions, can you tell the French people who are watching us who Tamara Volokhova is?”
Visibly discovering her existence directly, it would perhaps be good to remind Jordan Bardella of the European advisor’s career within her own party. Indeed, Tamara Volokhova is in the “Identity and Democracy” group, the far-right group in the European Parliament. Until 2023, she hosts the program “Vu d’Europe” where several MEPs from her political side are questioned on current issues, often linked to identity themes.
Former candidate in Strasbourg
A few months earlier, on the occasion of the 2022 legislative elections, Tamara Volokhova was also present in the National Rally lists for the first constituency of Strasbourg. Just naturalized, the 34-year-old young woman is not new to the far-right party. Arriving in France for her studies, the politician originally from Russia quickly became passionate about politics and in particular the National Front, which she joined in 2013. At Parisian, She even admits her admiration for Marine Le Pen. “The RN is the only party that can lift up France, which is falling apart, by providing concrete answers to the question of insecurity,” she told the daily.
While she describes herself in our columns as “an example of successful assimilation”, she nevertheless refutes a paradoxical question, once again posed by Gabriel Attal during the debate. Why would a party that advocates national preference – to counter interference, according to them – put a candidate who has just been naturalized in Parliament? “Marine Le Pen does not look at origins”, the candidate defended herself at the time. A mistake for some specialists and researchers for whom Tamara Volokhova would indeed play the role of an agent of influence for the Kremlin.
A risk of interference
As early as 2021, just before the legislative elections, researcher Anton Shekhovtsov warned about the relay position between Moscow and the European far right occupied by Tamara Volokhova. He explains in particular that the binational aims to promote the interests of Russian foreign policy within Europe and represents a threat to the European Parliament. If with the ParisianTamara Volokhova calls the accusations “grotesque”, Mediapart will decide to confirm the researcher’s doubts in a new survey published last November.
By revealing the content of a confidential note from the DGSI pointing out the risk of foreign interference, the investigative journal implicated four members of the RN suspected of being “relays of influence in France”. Among the names cited, former RN MEP and former international advisor to Marine Le Pen Aymeric Chauprade at the initiative of recruiting Tamara Volokhova as a parliamentary assistant between 2014 and 2016. During these years, numerous trips to Russia included was carried out by the young woman and at her side, Alexeï Kovalski, political advisor to the Russian ambassador in Paris and a more than influential figure between the party and the country. Perhaps even a spy for Russian foreign intelligence services, according to French intelligence
A fact that the National Rally sweeps away from Mediapart. “Tamara Volokhova has no decision-making power and no particular relationship that could be considered espionage. She’s not a spy. If there was the slightest element in this sense, we would not keep it”, defended Jean-Paul Garraud, president of the RN delegation to the European Parliament who sees in these accusations “discrimination” based only on “dual nationality Franco-Russian. A certain irony of fate on the part of an elected RN.