MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin met French far-right party leader Marine Le Pen in the Kremlin on Friday, handing her a potential boost to her campaign to win next month's presidential election in France.
The surprise meeting came hours after the National Front leader had urged Russian parliamentarians to support a joint fight against terrorism, adding that she favoured an end to European Union sanctions against their country.
“We’re not trying in any way to influence events but we reserve the right for ourselves to meet with representatives of all political forces of the country, as our partners do, for example in Europe and the US,” Putin said in televised comments at the opening of the meeting with Le Pen, which wasn’t announced in advance.
Putin told Le Pen that she represented "quite a fast-growing element of European political forces".
"Of course I know that the election campaign in France is actively developing," said Putin. "We do not want to influence events in any way, but we reserve the right to talk to representatives of all the country's political forces."
The meeting with Putin is a coup for Le Pen and could help her burnish her foreign policy credentials. While increasingly popular in France, she has struggled to get any backing abroad apart from support offered by other far-right parties.
Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, told reporters that Putin and Le Pen had not discussed the possibility of Russia offering any financial help to her political party.
Le Pen is seeking money to help her finance her presidential run and says French banks are refusing to lend her the millions of euros she needs. So far, she has a 6-million-euro loan from Cotelec, according to wealth filings with authorities made public this week.
Russia’s First Czech-Russian Bank helped Le Pen finance an earlier campaign with a 9-million-euro loan in 2014. In the same year, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen’s political fund Cotelec received another 2-million-euro loan from a Russian-backed fund based in Cyprus, the news website Mediapart reported.
Le Pen, who has said she admires the Russian leader, was visiting Russia at the invitation of Leonid Slutsky, head of the lower house of parliament's foreign affairs committee.
Earlier on Friday, Le Pen had cut short a schedule of events in the Russian parliament to meet Putin. Reporters had been told she would give a news conference at the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, after meeting Russian lawmakers, but she did not turn up at the designated time.
On Friday morning, Le Pen explained to Russian parliamentarians why she opposed EU sanctions imposed on Moscow over its role in the Ukraine crisis.
She also said that Russia and France needed to unite to fight global terrorism, a sentiment later echoed by Putin who has long advocated teaming up with the West to take on the Islamic State.
Le Pen, who is seen in polls as likely to reach the May 7 run-off for the presidency, is Putin’s most outspoken admirer among the top five French candidates. She openly backs his 2014 annexation of Crimea that along with the covert Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine prompted the EU to impose punitive measures.
Russia appeared to switch its support from Le Pen to Francois Fillon when he emerged as the conservative Republicans’ contender for the French presidency, with Putin telling reporters in November that they had “very good” relations.
With support for Fillon sliding ahead of first-round voting on April 23, polls show Le Pen is likely to face and lose to Emmanuel Macron in the run-off, a 39-year-old independent who backs the EU sanctions and accuses the Kremlin of cyberattacks on his campaign.