Lawfare against Le Pen will only turn her into the French Trump

The trial against the National Rally leader is doomed to have an unsatisfactory conclusion, guilty or innocent

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It’s tempting to take a leaf from a successful President Trump and dismiss the Marine Le Pen trial as a textbook example of lawfare. Paris Prosecutor Nicolas Barret’s move for a five-year jail sentence (with three years suspended), a 300,000-euro fine and, crucially, an immediate five-year ineligibility sentence, should the judges follow the prosecutor’s stipulations, makes a 2027 presidential run impossible, even if Le Pen appeals.
This is the harshest ever requested in the many tried cases of misuse of publicly-funded aides (in this case in Paris as well as in the European Parliament) by an array of perennially-penurious French political parties.
Vindictive and politically-motivated, then? It may be so. French judges, who are civil servants and notoriously skew Left, are so forthright about their political bent that for years, their main union featured on a wall of their offices a “Wall of C—-s” with pictures and caricatures of their “enemies”, all Right-wingers, including president Nicolas Sarkozy and activist parents of crime victims.
Only recently, last February, the Centrist leader François Bayrou was finally acquitted of much the same thing, after seven years of proceedings that effectively prevented him from being an irritant capable of derailing Emmanuel Macron’s plans. Even then, he was only at risk of suspended sentences, either of jail or ineligibility.
But the problem, whatever Le Pen (herself a barrister) says, is that she and the entire leadership of her party have serious allegations against them. Email after email were read in court showing concern and collusion: her own sister, telling her she was utterly incapable of the job she theoretically had been doing for four months in Strasbourg; the party treasurer explaining smugly the European Parliament aides’ salaries would “at last help keep the party afloat”; a future National Rally MP requesting permission to go to Strasbourg to get an idea of what she was supposed to have been in charge of; on and on.
Here again it’s not just the evidence of dishonesty that will harm the Rally (the French, as long as you haven’t been embezzling for your personal use, are pretty relaxed about dodgy political financing, especially as there are no big donors in the French political ecosystem; any individual being restricted to a measly 7,500 euros annually), more of sheer laziness and incompetence.
Questioned on why he hadn’t appointed a real chief of staff (he is after all the chair of the Patriots for Europe parliamentary group, which also includes Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, Austria’s far-Right FPÖ, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom, Spain’s Vox and Italy’s Lega), Jordan Bardella shot back that all he needed around him were “people [he] trusted”, which belongs in the Corleone repertory, not the Berlaymont.
Le Pen has denied any sense of guilt, implying she’s being persecuted by pernickety bureaucrats. If she truly is prevented from running in two years’ time though, the danger to French democracy, already corroded by lack of trust and a feeling that the fix is in, will be considerable. The judges would be better inspired to leave to voters the decision to kill off her political career in the ballot box – or not; the American example of electing a felon is not unthinkable here.
But “martyring” her while her case is being appealed; at it will of course be, and she is technically innocent, would be supremely unhelpful. It’s not just the hard-Right that’s criminally short-sighted in France.
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