The French justice system chose courage over surrender. The law was clear, and so was the court in its sentencing: no special treatment for Marine Le Pen, no deference to the powerful, no using a candidacy for office as an excuse to break the law with impunity.
For more than a decade, from 2004 to 2016, Le Pen’s reactionary rightwing party – named the Front National until 2018, when it became the Rassemblement National (RN) – operated an organised scheme to embezzle public funds by creating fictitious parliamentary assistant jobs at the European parliament, and to break other financial rules, in effect using European public money to finance a debt-ridden party domestically. Under a French anti-corruption law passed in 2016, the guilty verdict rendered against Le Pen comes with a sentence of ineligibility to run for office. The ban is for the next five years, effective immediately, which means that the sentence will hold all the way through an appeals process and will almost certainly torpedo any chance of her running for president in 2027.
Many will see parallels between the RN’s response to this verdict and the way that Donald Trump rallied the anger of his base last summer, after a court in New York found him guilty of a criminal hush-money scheme during the 2016 election. Indeed, Jordan Bardella, the 29-year-old likely successor to Le Pen (who led RN during the summer’s unanticipated legislative elections), is already playing the victim card, declaring that French democracy has been “killed”.
There are a number of important differences, though. First, this is a much more serious case and conviction than the one against Trump: a hush-money payment might seem salacious, but this involved more than a decade of systematically defrauding the public of millions of euros and had real implications for French politics. During the time that the embezzlement was under way, the FN/RN was heavily indebted to a Kremlin-connected Russian bank. Paying off the debt helped the party claim it no longer maintained inappropriate links to Vladimir Putin’s power circle – would it have been able to do so without the misused funds? And would it have been as competitive in the elections it contested without the unfair advantage of fraudulent finances?
Second, with Le Pen herself ineligible to run in 2027, an angry base will have to transfer its support to Bardella or another potential challenger. As might be expected, many on the right are decrying the immediacy of the ineligibility sentence – but so is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who broke from the rest of the left by declaring that the “impeachment” of a politician should be “left up to the people”. The Communist party, Greens and Socialists have, in various statements, underlined the importance of the rule of law and judicial independence.
We will never know what would have happened if the US justice system had not totally failed at protecting the rule of law against an attempted coup d’etat. On the other hand, we know the consequences of not acting: the destruction of the rule of law and state capacity, the creation of a parallel system of prerogative and privilege from proximity to political power, and a slide towards outright fascism.
But the law cannot be a substitute for politics, and the next judgment must be political. The far right has to be made to face its contradictions. It tells voters that the government is full of corrupt elites, or that immigrants are stealing social benefits – yet here are Le Pen and 24 other members of RN, convicted of the massive fraudulent use of public funds. It demands harsher sentencing from courts, and then plays the victim when it is handed harsh sentences. It superficially speaks the language of power, but what it really offers is weakness and submission – to Putin, to Trump. It doesn’t seem like this verdict will substantially change the far right’s message, or strategy; it was always going to claim victimhood at the hands of “the elites”. But it is here, in this third contradiction – what the parties really are and what their vision is to remake society – that there is the greatest opportunity to beat it politically.
The RN makes no secret about which company it keeps and attracts. The French court’s verdict was decried by such paragons of the rule of law as the Kremlin (“a violation of democratic norms”), Elon Musk (of course), who denounced an “abuse” of the judicial system, and Viktor Orbán, who posted: “Je suis Marine!” Exactly. Orbán is Marine; Putin is Marine; Trump is Marine.
By trying to link their illiberal behaviour across borders, leaders of the reactionary right have given defenders of liberal democracy a playbook to follow. It strikes me as odd that, so far, few European politicians have seen the explosive benefit to be had in positioning themselves as a kind of “anti-Trump”, as the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has done to such effect, despite his country being far more vulnerable to US aggression than most of Europe is. Perhaps, in fact, that vulnerability has allowed him to see the stakes more clearly – or at least, to be more honest about them with the Canadian public.
In polling from February, a worrying 48% of French people said “nothing moves in democracy, there should be less democracy and more effectiveness”. I don’t think people actually want less democracy, though; I think they want to feel like someone is standing up and fighting for them, and it’s well past time that liberal democracy became as vociferous in defence of itself as its critics are against it. Trumpism is the perfect foil, in part because it’s so deeply unpopular with European voters, who see it in action and who in response support the EU more than ever before, including broad popular support (even in the UK) for a European defence union.
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When it comes to the RN, submission is tied up with the name of the party itself. In 1936, a journalist asked Philippe Pétain, the French general and hero of the battle of Verdun, what the nation needed. “Rassemblement national,” (a national rally) replied Pétain, who, only four years later, would surrender his country to the Nazis and lead its collaborationist Vichy government.
In the US, the legal system submitted to the idea that the pursuit of justice and defence of the rule of law would disturb “unity”. In France, it has not. I think we’ll find that courage will pay off in the end.
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Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
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