French judges defend democracy against Marine Le Pen
Marine Le Pen,(Shutterstock)
The last person surprised by the unanimous decision of three judges to sentence Marine Le Pen to jail and ban her from holding public office for five years — thereby possibly killing her chances of running for the Elysée in 2027 — was Marine Le Pen herself.
Her trial — and that of 25 other National Rally politicians also accused of embezzling European Parliament funds on an industrial scale — has got little coverage in Britain. But as it unfolded, it became clearer and clearer that a guilty verdict was the only one possible.
Straight after the verdict the BBC ran an interview with Bruno Gollnisch, who was her deputy when her party was still called the National Front. (This was the name given to it by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who admired Pètain and described the Holocaust as “a detail of history.”) Gollnisch, 75, who was convicted in 2006 by a court in Lyon of Holocaust denial, is an intellectual. Like so many of his kind, here in Europe and in the United States, he is attracted to the sharp reliefs of ultra-nationalism. This kind of politics has commanded support and votes this century, as mass migration from the poorer south to the better-off north, as well the waves of refugees from the autocratic regimes, have made immigration and asylum seekers the top topic in politics.
Gollnisch spluttered to the World at One’s Sarah Montague that all he and other leaders of what the French press — in contrast to the more mealy-mouthed British journalists — calls “l’extrême droite” were doing was claiming expenses as MEPs. These expenses were perfectly legitimate, he insisted.
Marine Le Pen, however, will have heard evidence in court of full-time party workers at the Rassemblement national (National Rally) who were working on national party politics in France. They had never visited the European Parliament in Strasbourg or Brussels, had never met the MEP they were supposed to be working for and were 100 per cent national party workers, doing no work as European Parliamentary assistants.
It wasn’t a question of fiddling expenses for personal gain – the accusation against British MPs in the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009 – but a wholesale transfer of European taxpayers’ money to fund France’s far-Right party. Mme Le Pen sat grim-faced as she heard the evidence in court and most French media saw that she knew she was going to be hit hard.
The French centre-Right President, Nicolas Sarkozy, together with David Cameron, turned Syria and Libya into failed states after 2011 through which millions of immigrants and asylum seekers came from Africa and near East Arab countries to cross into Europe (some to the UK). He is also facing a possible prison sentence. Sarkozy is currently wearing an electronic tag, accused of taking £50 million from Colonel Gaddafi to finance his presidential campaign in 2007.
Sarkozy is yesterday’s man. Meanwhile Marine Le Pen was hoping that the judges would buy the argument that the voters should decide the next president of France, not the judiciary.
She still has a chance of overturning the verdict by appealing to France’s Constitutional Council (Court). Its new president only got the job with the help of Marine Le Pen’s deputies in the National Assembly and some in France think it is now pay-back time.
It does not help Macron if the next two years are consumed by French debates over “2-tier” political justice, with a court saying the voters of France cannot have as a candidate a woman who did after all, get the most votes in the National Assembly election last year.
No doubt JD Vance and Nigel Farage are already preparing their condemnation of the French ruling. Even if the Constitutional Court does find a fudge later in the summer, the details of the open theft of European Parliament money will not do Marine Le Pen’s image and reputation any good between now and the French presidential election in the summer of 2027.
She was also helped by Vladimir Putin, with a soft loan from a Kremlin controlled bank. At the time was she was closer to Nigel Farage and UKIP than any other party. When Brexit was voted in 2016 her social media pages were covered with union flags as she jubilated over the defeat for Europe at the hands of English voters..
But as she saw Brexit wasn’t working, even for its proponents on the nationalist anti-immigrant right in Britain, and was causing serious harm to the UK economy and growth prospects, she stopped invoking UKIP and Nigel Farage. She has also kept a distance from Trump, Musk and Vance, who are unsellable in France.
This latest blow to the populist, ethno-nationalist politics of the 21st century does not herald a return to the liberal centre, let alone the democratic left. Even if she gets to run for president, Marine Le Pen will probably lose and her condemnation by independent judges today will make this more likely. The promise held out by rightist intellectuals a decade ago that Europe was on an unstoppable march to right-wing governments and an end to the European Union has not — or maybe not yet — materialised.
Denis MacShane is the former Minister of Europe.
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