The former head of FRONTEX — the European Border and Coast Guard Agency — announced on Saturday that he has joined Marine Le Pen’s far-right party ahead of June’s European elections and will appear third on its ballot.

The National Alert (RN) has “a solid plan and the ability to implement it. We are determined to fight the flood of immigrants, which the European Commission and the Eurostats do not consider a problem, but rather a plan: I can testify to that,” says Fabrice Lezery in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche published last Saturday night.

The 55-year-old French civil servant served from 2015 to 2022 as the head of FRONTEX, before resigning amid a disciplinary investigation.

His tenure at the organization was marked by heaps of complaints from non-governmental organizations: FRONTEX, they pointed out among other things, tolerated illegal repatriations of migrants and seemed to have decided to impose itself as a guarantor of the impenetrability of Europe’s external borders.

“My aim is to put my experience (…) at the service of the French. After running FRONTEX for almost seven years and working for the state for some thirty years, especially in the fields of security and migration management, this decision is logically consistent,” he continues.

“The European elections on June 9 offer a unique opportunity to put France and Europe back on the right track,” he argues.

Jordan Bardela, first on the list and president of Marine Le Pen’s RN, is ahead of any other candidate in the European elections, attracting around 30% of voting intentions, more than ten points ahead of the candidates of President Emmanuel Macron’s party.

Mr Lezzeri’s inclusion is a sign of the far-right party’s intention to increase the pool of experts and technocrats in its ranks to gain credibility as it aspires to one day wield power.

Opinion polls have Marine Le Pen leading ahead of the first round of the 2027 presidential election.

Mr Lezzeri resigned in April 2022 as the executive director of FRONTEX following the opening of a disciplinary investigation by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF).

The former head of the border guard agency, according to the content of a confidential OLAF report that was leaked to the media, “did not follow procedures”, had shown “disloyalty to the EU” and “mismanaged his staff”.

“Regarding these accusations, it is important to note that neither the European Parliament nor the board of FRONTEX found convincing evidence to support them,” argued Fabrice Lesery to JDD.

“Actually, because I wanted immigration to be controlled, I was being pressured and feeling generally abandoned. The French government was pressuring me to resign. Germany had no intention of supporting me. The European Commission, clearly hostile towards me, wished for my departure”, he asserted.

The Warsaw-based FRONTEX, one of the EU’s most politically exposed organizations, has been continuously strengthened to deal with large migration flows in recent years.