French leader of the National Rally Party and parliament member Marine Le Pen attends a session at the National Assembly in Paris, France, December 16, 2024. (Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters)
Lawfare comes for Marine Le Pen.
Elections are so much easier if your opponent can’t run.
This is apparently an insight so obvious and universal that it’s now played a big role in both U.S. and French presidential politics.
Marine Le Pen, the French rightist and leader of the National Rally Party, was banned by a court this week from running for president.
This isn’t like, say, banning Kamala Harris from running for president in 2019 — a no-hoper destined to sink among a pack of otherwise undistinguished contenders.
No, it’s exactly like trying to keep Donald Trump from running in 2024 — taking out the leader of a powerful movement who has a very good chance of winning a national election.
In fact, in the very early going, Le Pen is in a stronger position than Trump was last year. In the polling, she’s been running ten points ahead in the race to succeed the term-limited Emmanuel Macron in the 2027 election.
Now, Le Pen isn’t my cup of tea, or my glass of Chardonnay (no major French politician ever is). Disqualifying her for office, though, is a disgraceful offense against democracy that shouldn’t stand.
It isn’t a coincidence that she, like Trump, is feared and loathed by her opponents and the political establishment.
It can’t become part of the playbook against populist outsiders to take a small offense, blow it up, and use the courts to prevent them from running for office in campaigns that they have a good chance to win.
Le Pen was convicted of what they are calling “embezzlement,” but this is less Senator Robert Menendez stuff than what Christopher Caldwell calls a Hatch Act violation.
Her party took funds from the European Parliament that were supposed to pay for parliamentary workers in Brussels and instead used them for party employees back in France.
This is illegal and there’s no doubt that National Rally did it, but it’s not the crime of the century — other parties have done it — and there is no way that it warrants the political death penalty. (The National Rally use of this subterfuge began, by the way, years before Marine Le Pen took over the party.)
Usually, in France, when you appeal a verdict, the sentence is suspended. In this case, conveniently, the prosecutors wanted the prohibition on her running in the campaign imposed immediately and regardless of appeal.
A Politico EU piece calls the court’s decision “rare, but not unprecedented, and based on what it viewed as the gravity of the case and the risk of repeat offenses.”
Repeat offenses? Are we supposed to believe she’d get elected president and undertake — after all the trouble of fighting this case and getting convicted — a new scheme to funnel EU money to party workers?
The judges characterized their decision as necessary to avoiding a “major disruption to democratic public order.” As compared to the disruption to the democratic order of the leading candidate for the presidency getting banned from running for office?
The lawfare campaign against Trump failed because, even with an attenuated felony on the books, he could still keep running, while the other cases fell apart based on prosecutorial misconduct (Fani Willis) or constitutional infirmity (Jack Smith), impossible timing, and the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.
Democrats had to beat Trump fair and square, without his being jailed or sitting in a courtroom for much of the campaign, and couldn’t do it. The public took account of the entirety of Trump’s record and rendered its judgment, which is how it’s supposed to work in a fully functioning democracy.
France should take note.