Monday’s embezzlement conviction of Marine Le Pen, leader of the populist National Rally in France, extends the establishment lawfare campaign against the New Right across the Western world.
It is a problem not restricted to France but obvious from this side of the Atlantic Ocean, where President Donald Trump had the justice system weaponized against him, all the way to the eastern fringe of Europe. It is spreading an antidemocratic stain across the politics that we used to define by referring to it as free and is being spread, ironically, by those who frequently claim to be acting to save democracy from the forces of autocracy.
Le Pen was found guilty of improperly using European Union administrative funds to pay for political work by staff. This, she may well have done. Her punishment was to be sentenced to four years of imprisonment, although she will not actually be put behind bars and will instead merely wear an electronic bracelet for two years.
The sentence was, therefore, essentially notional, which exposes the purpose of the prosecution as clearly an effort to achieve the corollary, which is banning Le Pen from standing for election for the next five years. This pushes her past the 2027 presidential race, in which she is the front-runner.
Paying staff with money meant for other purposes is not uncommon. The party of French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou was found guilty of doing so last year, although the prime minister himself was acquitted for lack of evidence. But, as posted this week by Dan Hannan, a former member of the European Parliament and now a Washington Examiner columnist, what Le Pen did was common practice. “Scamming the European Parliament,” he wrote, “God knows it happened often enough, though an unwritten rule meant Europhiles were almost never investigated.”
Europhiles are globalists, believing in supranational organizations rather than national sovereignty, and thus, they are the opposite of nationalists. Their views are those approved by the undemocratic oligarchs, the permanent civil service, the deep state, or whatever you want to call it, and the establishment parties with whom they work hand in glove.
Le Pen, being France’s preeminent nationalist, is anathema to these people but increasingly popular among patriotic voters who want what is French not to be dissolved and deprecated by mass immigration, by bien pensant laws, and by regulations about which voters were not even asked, let alone that they approved.
Le Pen was thus victimized like the out-of-state driver exceeding the speed limit on a highway with all the other cars but singled out and pulled over by local police who can tell by the tags that this one is ripe for prosecution.
Her offense was, it seems, not very different from the bookkeeping “crimes” for which Trump was convicted by rogue partisan prosecutor Alvin Bragg in Manhattan last year. Bragg started from the premise that he would nail Trump and, from there, proceeded to froth up 34 charges that carried a maximum of more than a century in prison for mislabeling hush money for porn actress Stormy Daniels as “legal expenses.”
The result, an abject failure to prevent Trump from participating in, let alone winning, the presidential election, stands a good chance of being repeated in France. Le Pen will appeal her conviction. She hit back at the prosecution Tuesday, saying the deep state banned her “because nothing else worked, but we will NOT allow them to steal the election. … We’re going to win.”
Will lawfare backfire in France the way it backfired in America? The prosecution, and the special care the court took to sentence Le Pen immediately and set her election ban, will entrench the feeling among an increasing number of independents being drawn to her that the judicial system has been weaponized to thwart democracy.
The camp of long-standing liberalism and increasingly statist leftism is turning the criminal justice system against its political opponents because it can no longer defeat them in elections.
This malign process is being aided by politically motivated judges who stand with the establishment against populist democracy. In France, judges went out of their way to impose a political punishment on Le Pen. In the United States, it is not only judges such as Juan Merchan, who presided over the Daniels case, but an additional platoon of district court judges imposing nationwide injunctions to stop Trump from pushing his agenda forward.
Although Trump is probably going too far in suggesting such judges should be impeached, there is justified unease as courts stymie Trump beyond their authority where democratic elections have failed to do so.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) exposed the judges’ lack of authority with revealing questions posed to the Department of Justice in congressional hearings, a video of which was reposted on X by Elon Musk.
EMBARRASSING DISPLAYS OF MEDIA BLINDNESS
The Justice Department maintains that neither statute nor Supreme Court rulings on the Constitution grant power to lower court justices to impose blanket bans, yet they are doing so against Trump at an unprecedented pace.
The Left complains that Trump is at war against the legal system. The reverse is closer to the truth. The legal system, or at least many judges in it, are in league with those fighting Trump. And also fighting Trumpy politicians on the other side of the Atlantic.