Marine Le Pen has been found guilty of misappropriating European Parliament funds to support her political party in France. The sentence includes both hard “prison” time (2 years with an electronic bracelet) and, more seriously, 5 years during which she is not eligible to run for office. What is more, it will take effect immediately, even while appeals are pending, by explicit order of the court. The decision transforms the 2027 presidential race, in which Le Pen would have been a frontrunner.
Her number 2, Jordan Bardella, will seek to replace her, but he will very likely have challengers from within the party, starting with spokesman Sébastien Chenu. Le Pen may be able to accelerate the appeals process, which just might culminate in time to allow her to reinstate her candidacy, but there is no certainty of that. In the meantime, the court’s decision blasts open a whole new battlefield for 2027. With Le Pen sidelined, the contest among the remaining hopefuls, especially on the right, will intensify. The race to appeal to Le Pen voters will make for some ugly politics.
The RN, taking a leaf from Trump’s playbook, will of course attack the “weaponization” of the judicial system. And they will have a point, since many other politicians, including the current prime minister, François Bayrou, and former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is even now wearing an electronic bracelet of his own, have been accused of similar campaign finance violations. Sarkozy is on trial now for accepting money from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, surely a worse offense than siphoning money out of the European Parliament, but Sarkozy was never disqualified from office, even though suspicions of occult financing date back to before his presidential campaign.
Still, recent experience in the US with election tampering teaches us that courts should not be dissuaded from enforcing the law simply because the accused is a popular politician. On the other hand, democratic deference demands that unelected judges should be wary of depriving voters of the opportunity to express their will freely. The dilemma is acute and likely to become worse unless France reforms its campaign finance laws. But reform is a double-edged sword, since expansion of legal financing sources can easily open the way to more direct influence of wealthy donors on the electoral process. Indirect influence through media owned by wealthy individuals such as Vincent Bolloré is already a problem that could become worse if such individuals are allowed to finance political campaigns.