Unelected judge and prosecutor make Le Pen a martyr

How does this all end?

Amidst the constant establishmentarian lawfare – or, from the establishment perspective, the rise of norm-shattering populists – that question is repeating in the heads of politicos and non-politicos alike. Where is this all going?

The establishmentarian are content to play a game of whack-a-mole with the populists, thinking that if they can just whack enough moles, they’ll stop popping up. And across the West, they have been playing an awful lot: bans on Călin Georgescu and election cancellations in Romania, threats of a ban on the AfD in Germany, investigations against Georgia Meloni in Italy, threats of prison against opposition members in Poland, and a multitude of court cases against Donald Trump in America, all just in the past few years.

And now, we can add France to the list, with yesterday’s appalling verdict against Marine Le Pen, which saw the presidential candidate banned from office for the next five years – conspicuously, removing her from the 2027 presidential election. The charges, embezzlement of European Union funds, are not insignificant, but what she was accused of doing is also not rare.

The sentence is also disproportionate and democratically dangerous. This point has been made ad nauseum in the last twenty-four hours, but it bears repeating: Marine Le Pen was almost guaranteed to make it to the second round of the French presidential election. This should not render her, nor anyone else, immune from prosecution. But in this era of immense distrust in government and in institutions – a survey from earlier this year found that a mere 22 per cent of French citizens have trust in their representative – banning a major candidate from running is not going to make the problem of distrust go away. It will only worsen it. There is no one who will see this ruling and think, “Ah, I liked what Le Pen was selling before, but now that the unelected judge and the prosecutor have worked to ban her from office, the scales have fallen from my eyes.”

The same happened in Romania, when Georgescu was first banned back in December, before the presidential elections were cancelled there. In the first round of their two-round system, Georgescu had achieved just under 23 percent of the vote, coming in first. When those elections were cancelled and Georgescu had announced a run in the next elections, his support rose to over 40 per cent in some polls. Georgescu had been made a martyr by an establishment determined to make it so people could not hear his message – something people have responded to for thousands of years.

Le Pen will now be in a similar boat. Her message cannot be heard: her sentence will require her to be confined to her home for two years, depriving her of the ability to campaign. But she will now be a martyr, thanks to the lack of discretion from the judge.

And, truth be told, her party will likely be the better for it. Try as they might, the Le Pen family simply was never able to enter the French presidency. Her father was obliterated in his attempt to win power in 2002, getting less than 20 percent of the vote in the second round. The younger Le Pen, while putting up a good fight, lost by sizable margins in both 2017 and 2022. Though presidential polling is sparse in France, polls taken last year have Le Pen hovering at about 50 percent against most opponents, other than the deeply unpopular leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is unlikely to make the second round (and “hope to run against a weak candidate” is a terrible political strategy).

This is before a campaign starts in earnest, where the media and her opponents will be quick to highlight everything Le Pen has ever said in her long career (and they will be sure to mention her Holocaust-sceptical father, of course). Many have said that Le Pen was the front-runner in the next presidential election, but the truth is she was only the front-runner in the first round. If she had won in the second, it would have been by the skin of her teeth – but she likely would have lost.

Now, however, she is a martyr. Her political opponents will no longer be able to use the threat of a Le Pen presidency, but her supporters will be angered and feel empowered. And she already has a clear successor: Jordan Bardella, the young and popular nominal leader of Le Pen’s party, the National Rally. Truth be told, the only thing that had been standing in his way was Le Pen herself, who stubbornly – and perhaps, selfishly – refused to allow him the full spotlight, even though he likely has a better chance at winning the presidency than she does.

But that no longer matters. Because now, the establishmentarians have made the question null and void. The weaker candidate, Marine Le Pen, has been replaced with Martyr Marine. And now Bardella has an open road to ride a tide of revenge to the Palais de l’Élysée in 2027.