terça-feira, 1 de abril de 2025
Marine Le Pen Falls to the Rule of Law and a Great Battle Looms
News Analysis
Marine Le
Pen Falls to the Rule of Law and a Great Battle Looms
A court’s
conviction of the far-right leader for embezzlement and its ban on her running
for office have set off a new crisis for France.
Roger Cohen
By Roger
Cohen
March 31,
2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/world/europe/marine-le-pen-embezzelment-democracy.html
Last year,
Marine Le Pen spoke menacingly of the possible fallout from her trial on
embezzlement charges. “Tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French
people will see themselves deprived of their candidate for the presidency.”
After a
court disqualified her on Monday from running for public office for five years,
those millions of French voters are adrift and angry. France is a democracy
governed by the rule of law, as the verdict demonstrated. But it is unclear how
far its troubled Fifth Republic can resist an inevitable gale of political
protest before the 2027 election.
Unlike
President Trump, who met with convictions, indictments and criminal cases on
the way to his election last year, possibly even benefiting from perceived
persecution, Ms. Le Pen could find no political path past the verdict of the
French legal system.
“The
independence of our justice system and the separation of powers stand at the
heart of our democracy,” said Valérie Hayer, a centrist lawmaker in the
European Parliament. “Nobody is above the law.”
That view is
certain to come under sustained attack in a global environment where
questioning of the legitimacy of legal systems has become frequent — across
Europe, but particularly in Mr. Trump’s United States. Mr. Trump has called for
the impeachment of judges who rule against him and called them “lunatics.”
“When the
radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail
their opponents,” Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s billionaire aide, said after the
verdict.
European
societies, given their history, are sensitive to the revival of far-right
movements. France, like Germany, has a visceral memory of how fragile
democratic institutions are and how once the rule of law goes, the way is open
to dictatorial power.
“After Ms.
Le Pen, the next direct target of a big political battle is going to be the
rule of law,” said Alain Duhamel, a prominent political scientist. “There will
be accusations that this is a government of judges, attacks on our highest
court, not just from the National Rally but the center right,” he said, naming
Ms. Le Pen’s party.
But, he
added, “French magistrates are resolutely independent.”
Jordan
Bardella, Ms. Le Pen’s carefully groomed protégé, pronounced French democracy
dead, killed by the court. It is not; and to Mr. Bardella will no doubt fall
the task of leading the anti-immigrant party into the election, unless Ms. Le
Pen’s appeal overturns her ban in time.
At 29, he is
young to aspire to the highest office, but he has demonstrated broad appeal and
a near-unflappable command of detail. Just how he disentangles his ambitions
from Ms. Le Pen’s remains to be seen. Up to now, they have avoided conflict.
Across
Europe, the far right leaped on the court’s decision.
Matteo
Salvini, Italy’s hard-right deputy prime minister, said those “who are afraid
of voters’ judgment” often seek reassurance from courts’ judgment. Viktor
Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, said that he stood with Ms. Le Pen.
In Moscow,
Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said, “More and more European capitals
have opted for the violation of democratic norms.”
Of course,
critiques of democracy from President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia are hardly
persuasive. But in this case they overlap significantly with those of the U.S.
vice president, JD Vance, who in February attacked European states for trying
to stifle the far right in the name of saving democracy.
Ms. Le Pen,
like it or not, may now become another element in the Vance-Musk case for
European democratic failure. The fact is, however, she was convicted, after
prolonged investigation and on detailed evidence, of embezzling millions of
dollars of European Union funds to pay party staff members with money intended
for aides to European lawmakers.
Over the
past decade, Ms. Le Pen led a campaign of “de-demonization,” shifting her
National Rally party from its fascist antisemitic roots to an anti-immigrant
mainstream party that has more seats in the National Assembly than any other.
She could
now direct the party to make trouble.
The most
direct means would be to overturn the centrist government of Prime Minister
François Bayrou by supporting a no-confidence motion this year, in effect
saying to the French people that they should be the judges and issue their
verdict in a parliamentary election.
A major
swing to the National Rally would not open the way for Ms. Le Pen to become
president, but it would be a powerful statement.
If there is
a parliamentary election, which can be held after June, Ms. Le Pen could not
defend her current seat, but nothing would prevent her from becoming prime
minister if the National Rally won big.
“The
tribunal demonstrated its political will, not legal but political,” said
Wallerand de Saint-Just, a former party treasurer who was also convicted.
Not so, said
a host of centrist politicians, who have made their pride in the French legal
system clear as Mr. Trump attacks a supposedly “weaponized” American judiciary.
“Madame Le
Pen, whether elected or a candidate, is a French citizen,” said Sacha Houlié, a
center-left lawmaker. “The law of the Republic applies.”
Roger Cohen
is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has
reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza,
in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a
correspondent, foreign editor and columnist. More about Roger Cohen
Marine Le Pen attacks ban on French presidency run as a ‘political decision’
Marine Le
Pen attacks ban on French presidency run as a ‘political decision’
Far-right
leader, who was found guilty of embezzlement of European funds, says conviction
is a ‘denial of democracy’
Angelique
Chrisafis in Paris
Mon 31 Mar
2025 20.39 BST
The French
far-right leader Marine Le Pen has railed against a Paris court’s “political
decision” to bar her from competing for the presidency in 2027, attacking the
move to ban her from running for public office as “a denial of democracy”.
In a day of
high political drama, Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement of European
parliament funds on a vast scale, a conviction for which she was also handed a
four-year prison sentence, with two of those years suspended and two to be
served outside jail with an electronic bracelet. She was also ordered to pay a
€100,000 (£84,000) fine.
A furious Le
Pen announced she would lodge an appeal against the ruling, as nationalist and
populist figures from around the world rushed to support her.
Donald Trump
said the conviction was a “very big deal”.
“I know all
about it, and a lot of people thought she wasn’t going to be convicted of
anything,” the US president told reporters at the White House. “But she was
banned for running for five years, and she’s the leading candidate. That sounds
like this country, that sounds very much like this country,” Trump said, in an
apparent reference to legal cases that Trump himself faced before he took
office.
Elon Musk,
Tesla’s billionaire owner, who has backed the far right in Germany and plays a
major role in Trump’s administration, said the sentence against Le Pen would
“backfire, like the legal attacks against president Trump”.
The judges’
decision, backed by more than 150 pages of legal justifications after a
nine-week trial, was necessary because nobody was entitled to “immunity in
violation of the rule of law”, the head judge, Bénédicte de Perthuis, said.
It was
nonetheless considered a political earthquake in France as Le Pen had hoped to
mount a fourth campaign to become president for her anti-immigration National
Rally (RN) party.
Speaking for
the first time in public about the verdict, Le Pen told TF1 television on
Monday night that she would “pursue whatever legal avenues” she could to
prevent herself from being “eliminated”. “I’m not going to submit to a denial
of democracy this easily,” she said.
Le Pen, who
was not found to have benefited personally from the embezzlement, insisted she
had done nothing wrong. “I am going to appeal because I am innocent,” she said.
“I’m not
going to let myself be eliminated like this. I’m going to pursue whatever legal
avenues I can,” she added.
The RN, the
single largest party in the French parliament, called the sentence a travesty.
The
president of the RN, Jordan Bardella, 29, who could be considered a replacement
presidential candidate despite his relative inexperience, said: “Today it is
not only Marine Le Pen who was unjustly condemned: French democracy was
killed.”
He urged
party supporters to “mobilise” peacefully to show “that the will of the people
is stronger”, starting a petition in support of Le Pen and a leafleting
campaign across the country to take place this weekend.
The ban on
running for public office, to last five years, was ordered to kick in with
immediate effect, meaning it will apply even though Le Pen, 56, is appealing
against the verdict.
Neither the
prison penalty nor fine will be applied until her appeals are exhausted, a
process that could take years.
In the front
row of the court, Le Pen showed no immediate reaction when the judge declared
her guilty. But she grew more agitated and shook her head in disagreement as
the judge said her party had illegally used European funds for its own benefit.
At one
point, Le Pen whispered: “Incredible.” She then abruptly left without warning,
before her sentence had been handed down.
Before
Monday’s ruling, she had considered the 2027 presidential race as her best
chance to gain more ground on an anti-immigration platform, while her opponents
attacked her party’s policy platform as racist, xenophobic and anti-Islam.
The French
Socialist party said in a statement that the “independence of the justice
system and the rule of law” must be respected by all. The former Socialist
president, François Hollande, said the judge’s decision was “based on law” for
“serious” allegations. But Laurent Wauquiez, of the traditional right Les
Républicains party, said it was a “very heavy and exceptional sentence” that
was “not very healthy in democracy”.
Mathieu
Lefèvre, a member of parliament for Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, told
BFMTV: “Marine Le Pen isn’t the victim of a political or judicial conspiracy.
She’s perhaps first the victim of herself and a system of embezzlement.”
Le Pen and
24 party members, including nine former members of the European parliament and
their 12 parliamentary assistants, were found guilty of a vast scheme over many
years to embezzle European parliament funds, by using money earmarked for
European parliament assistants to instead pay party workers in France.
The
so-called fake jobs system covered parliamentary assistant contracts between
2004 and 2016, and was unprecedented in scale and duration, causing losses of
€4.5m (£3.8m) to European taxpayer funds. Assistants paid by the European
parliament must work directly on Strasbourg parliamentary matters, which the
judges found had not been the case.
Le Pen will
be able to retain her current post as a member of the French parliament for
Pas-de-Calais, but will not be able to stand again in a future parliamentary
election for the duration of her ban on running for office.
Le Pen took
over the leadership of the Front National from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen,
in 2011 and began a drive to sanitise the party’s jackbooted, antisemitic
image.
She renamed
the party National Rally in 2018, wanting it to be viewed as a potential
governing force, not just a protest movement, and has run for president three
times, twice making it to the final run-off against Emmanuel Macron.
In 2022, Le
Pen provided the far right with its highest-ever tally in a French presidential
election, winning more than 13m votes.
An Ifop poll
published by the Journal du Dimanche newspaper this weekend found Le Pen could
have won 34-37% in the first round of the next presidential election and her
fate in the run-off second round would depend on whether all her opponents
united to vote against her.
The party
will now have to decide who would take her place in the next French
presidential race. Bardella, a member of the European parliament, is popular
among voters but is seen as having little experience.
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