(This Feb. 18 story has been corrected to fix the spelling of Frontex in paragraphs 1 and 2)
PARIS (Reuters) – The former director of the European Union’s border agency Frontex said he will run in the June European elections on the list of French far-right party Rassemblement National (RN).
Fabrice Leggeri, who quit Frontex in 2022 after accusations that the agency had mistreated migrants on external EU frontiers, told French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche he would join RN president Jordan Bardella on the party list in June.
Leggeri said the RN’s objective is to regain control of French and EU borders.
“We are determined to combat migratory submersion, which the European Commission and eurocrats do not consider as a problem but rather as a project: I can testify to that,” he said.
A former top French civil servant who went to the same elite ENA school attended by President Emmanuel Macron and many other top French policymakers, Leggeri was put in charge of Frontex in 2015, when EU countries gave the agency additional money and powers after more than a million Syrian refugees reached Europe.
(Reporting by Geert De Clercq; Editing by David Holmes)
