France's far-right National Front (FN) party leader, Marine Le Pen leaves after attending a ceremony at The Invalides | Ian Langsdon/ AFP via Getty Marine Le Pen’s cash-flow crisis The National Front doesn’t have enough money for a presidential campaign — and its funding options are far from ideal.

PARIS — Marine Le Pen's presidential campaign says it will run out of steam in December unless her anti-EU party can find €8 million to bankroll its events.

Seven months before the French head to the polls, Le Pen is already hard at work on the campaign trail. Earlier this month in the Riviera town of Fréjus, which is controlled by the National Front, she presided over a sprawling event designed to cement its transformation from a party of protest into a party capable of government, three weeks after another expensive gathering in the eastern French town of Brachay.

But while Le Pen projects strength and rides high in opinion polls, her campaign finance manager Jean-Michel Dubois told POLITICO that her party had only €4 million of the "minimum" €12 million needed to underwrite a proper presidential campaign. Taken together with the cost of a campaign for parliament seats after the presidential vote, Le Pen's party is short by more than €20 million, said Dubois and National Front treasurer Wallerand de Saint-Just.

"How do you want to run a campaign without funding?" said Dubois. "If nothing changes in the next few months, we will have to run a minimal campaign that will not be on the scale of Marine's ambitions."

Saint-Just added that the trouble would start in December when the party will start to plan for the final stretch of the presidential campaign.

Le Pen's begging bowl

The Front's chronic funding shortage underscores an irony at the heart of its anti-establishment posturing.

Virulently critical of big banks and of any foreign influence on French politics, the National Front remains heavily reliant on foreign banks to fuel its march on power. In 2014, it secured a €9 million loan from Europe-Russia Bank (ERB), a Moscow-backed lender based in the Czech Republic, that allowed it to fund two national election campaigns.

Now it has no choice but to go knocking on the doors of foreign banks once again.

The money problems also reflect a weakness in the organization of a party that is struggling to overcome a reputation for amateurishness.

Unlike the U.S. presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders – frequently cited by Le Pen as an example of a well-run campaign by an outsider – Le Pen's party never set up an efficient grassroots fundraising campaign. It also lacks access, according to Dubois, to a network of financial players in New York and London that other presidential candidates — from conservative frontrunner Alain Juppé to government dropout Emmanuel Macron — call upon for donations.

The only avenues left available are Cotelec, a lender presided over by Marine's father Jean-Marie Le Pen, and foreign banks. But, at least on the latter score, the prospects look grim after the Czech Republic's central bank in March banned the ERB from taking deposits or making loans, according to Reuters.

"The bank does not lend anymore, but we still need to pay back what we've borrowed, that's how these things work," said Saint-Just. "The loan was not granted with any kind of favorable conditions for us."

A 'rigged' system

For Dubois, French banks' refusal to lend to the Front is proof that the system is rigged against them.

Le Pen's team sent letters soliciting funds to 45 banks in France and abroad. None of the banks courted by the party has responded favorably, Dubois said. In May, Le Pen complained that Frédéric Oudéa, head of the French Banking Federation, had refused to meet with her to discuss the matter.

Behind the complaints of financial injustice is a desire to show that the National Front is doing its utmost to secure a loan from a French bank.

For Front officials, the solution to their problems could be to have France's Socialist government intervene on their behalf, out of "respect for democracy."

French election rules state that all candidates who win more than 5 percent of the popular vote get their expenses reimbursed. That's almost certain to happen with Le Pen, who is polling as high as 30 percent, which would allow her party to service any loan.

But Dubois noted that banks were refusing to lend to all political parties, not just to the Front.

In the wake of the "Bygmalion affair" — a scandal linked to alleged improper accounting during Nicolas Sarkozy's 2012 campaign — French banks have become wary of lending to political parties. The banks do, however, continue to roll over the conservative Républicains party's debts, which run to some €60 million.

"Thank you, Nicolas Sarkozy," said Dubois, tongue firmly in cheek.

An official at the French Banking Federation said each bank was free to follow its own lending practices. However, their approach was contingent on an evaluation of commercial and regulatory risks attached to any loan, and recent lawsuits could influence the banks' risk assessment.

In the National Front's case, there is no campaign finance scandal comparable to the Bygmalion affair. But Saint-Just and other officials linked to the party are under formal investigation on suspicion that they inflated campaign spending in 2012 to increase the amount they would be paid back by the state.

Saint-Just denies any wrongdoing.

Strings attached

Behind the complaints of financial injustice is a desire to show that the National Front is doing its utmost to secure a loan from a French bank.

Le Pen's decision to borrow from a Russian-backed bank brought accusations that the Front, which is openly supportive of President Vladimir Putin, had been bought by the Kremlin. Asked about the Russian loan, Le Pen told journalists in Fréjus that it came with no strings attached, and was being paid back with interest.

"I would absolutely not feel any obligation toward foreign banks," Le Pen said. "It would just be a loan with interest."

However, a close look at the Front's voting records in the European Parliament suggests, at the very least, that the Front has aligned its foreign policy agenda with Moscow. According to researcher Jean-Yves Camus, 93 percent of votes by the Europe of Nations and Freedoms (ENL) group, to which the National Front belongs, went in the direction of Russia's interests.

"At the European Parliament, ENL officials defend in a constant manner the interest of Russia, whether it's during their actions in various committees, in the plenary session or through their votes," says Camus' report.

The other obvious source of funding for the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen's lender Cotelec, is also problematic. The elder Le Pen was kicked out of the party last year for making anti-Semitic and xenophobic comments, and the party wants to break all links with his legacy, going as far as to remove references to the National Front and its tricolor flame logo from its campaign material.

But the financial ties are unbroken. The elder Le Pen told POLITICO that he would probably sign off on loans to the National Front, as he did during regional elections late last year.

Front officials say Jean-Marie has no choice: Cotelec functions by accepting loans from private lenders at an interest rate of 3 percent, then repackaging them and giving them to candidates at 6 percent. Since no other political party will borrow from Cotelec, they argue, Le Pen has no choice but to finance his daughter.

Even so, for a party desperate to sever any link with its scandal-tainted past, being depending on loans from Jean-Marie Le Pen is not ideal.

In the end, the National Front is likely to use money from a foreign lender and from Cotelec, but that will only fuel the impression that the party is a mouthpiece for its financiers — no matter how loudly Marine Le Pen proclaims her independence.