RUTHFULLY YOURS

An insurgent politician, spoiling to cause an upset and topple the establishment, removed from the ballot paper following corruption charges. No, I’m not talking about Erdogan’s Turkey, or some other faraway autocracy, but nominally democratic France, where a court has just upended the next presidential election.

Marine Le Pen – leader of the right-wing National Rally (RN), preparing for a fourth tilt at the French presidency in 2027 – has been banned from standing for election for five years. She’s been found guilty for her role in siphoning off millions of euros in European Parliament funds and using it to fund RN’s domestic political activities. She’s also been fined €100,000 and sentenced to four years in prison – though she would only serve half of that, under house arrest.

It might not come to that – Le Pen will immediately appeal her sentence, a process that could take years. But the five-year ban on her running for president, or any other form of elected office, will take effect immediately, making another bid for the Élysée in two years’ time incredibly unlikely, if not totally impossible.

On the embezzlement charges themselves, Le Pen may well be bang to rights – even if a little creative accounting has long been par for the course among the Brussels set. The judge said National Rally staff had signed ‘fictional contracts’, establishing that ‘all these people were in reality working for the party and not for the MEP to which they were theoretically attached’. Le Pen refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing throughout, leading to a harsher sentence.

Still, that the judge granted prosecutors’ request for a fittingly titled ‘provisional execution ban’, decapitating her presidential campaign before it even began, has rightly shocked Le Pen’s supporters and even a few of her opponents. She stormed out before her full sentence could be read out. After her trial in November, Gérald Darmanin, the justice minister in Emmanuel Macron’s government and aspiring presidential candidate, insisted ‘Madame Le Pen must be fought at the ballot box, not elsewhere’. The giddy reception the ruling has received from sections of the French left, meanwhile, has been depressing – if depressingly predictable.

For true democrats, Le Pen’s politics are irrelevant. Whether or not she – or any politician – should get to lead France must be decided at the election, not in court. Voters are more than capable of rendering their verdict on her, her policies and her crimes – of judging whether her hard-right party’s ‘moderate’ makeover is legit and whether her conviction should rule her out of high office. That she supported the 2016 law that has now brought her candidacy down is also irrelevant. The democratic stakes are far too high to be crowded out by schadenfreude and howls of ‘hypocrisy’.

French voters are furious with the elites, as embodied by Emmanuel Macron, seeing out his second and final term as president – a man whose elitism would make the old French kings wince. His election in 2017 was supposed to be a victory for technocratic competence and a crushing defeat for populism. Today, he is a lame-duck president and someone with the surname Le Pen is 10 points ahead in some polls. This was simply unthinkable when Marine Le Pen first took over the then National Front from her anti-Semitic father, Jean-Marie, before later expelling him as part of her ‘detoxification’ efforts.

The RN – despite its despicable past and questionable present – has become the weapon that abandoned French workers are reaching for to hit back at a distant Paris. And not because they have suddenly become racists and fascists, as the media would have you believe. With the left long having disappeared up the fundament of environmentalism and identity politics, the right is where forgotten voters, seeking to upend a failed globalist consensus, are flocking. Taking RN’s leader off the ballot will be felt among these people as an affront to democracy. Because it is, whatever the legal niceties.

This is a story that keeps repeating itself. The more voters rebel against the European establishment, the more anti-establishment candidates are taken off the field. In Romania, the spectre of Russian interference was used to justify the overturning of its presidential election last year and the eventual banning of its victor, ultra-nationalist oddball Calin Georgescu. In Germany, the ‘centrists’ have long flirted with banning the obnoxious AfD, on the grounds it is a threat to democracy, the irony apparently lost on them.

We all know where the most clear and pressing threats to European democracy are coming from right now – from embattled elites who want to crush populist challengers, laws that hold ordinary people in contempt, and useful idiots who would rather cackle at their opponents’ downfall than stand on a point of democratic principle. Call me old-fashioned, but I think voters should get to choose – and turf out – their rulers. Apparently, that’s a fight Europeans need to have all over again.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater