National Rally leader and the woman most likely to become the next President of France, Marine Le Pen, has been banned from running in the 2027 election.
The punishment comes as Le Pen and twenty-three codefendants were convicted of misappropriating €4.8 million in European Parliament funds over twelve years (2004 - 2016). Le Pen was personally liable for €474,000 of the total, and was punished with a two-year suspended sentence, two years under house arrest, a five-year ban on holding political office, and a €100,000 fine. An appeal has been launched, but may take until after the next Presidential election to be resolved. Le Pen has been forced to stand down as a local official with immediate effect.
National Rally itself was fined €2 million — halved to €1 million if the offence is not repeated.
The conviction alone would not automatically disqualify Le Pen from holding office for five years. The ban was decided by the Judge Bénédicte de Perthuis — who cited Le Pen’s Euroscepticism, and that she “had not expressed any conscience of their violation of the law nor the importance of integrity” as justification for the harsh penalty.
In the 2024 legislative election, National Rally won the most votes of any party in the first round in June (9.3 million, 33 percent) and second in July (8.7 million, 37 percent), but were gatekept out of government by an alliance of every other party — bringing so-called centrists into coalition with the soft-right Republicans and the social progressive Radical Party of the Left. National Rally’s coalition received only 142 seats, to their opponents’ 577. Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s popular 28-year-old deputy, was prevented from becoming Prime Minister.
Former EU Commissioner, Michel Barnier’s tenure as Macron’s pick for Prime Minister was short-lived, however: elected on the 5th of September, suffering a vote of no confidence on the 4th of December, and removed on the 13th after just three months. His replacement, Francois Bayrou, has suggested Le Pen’s ban from holding office sets a dangerous precedent — and may inadvertently lead to National Rally garnering further support from the discontented French public, who see the verdict as a blatant partisan judgement.
The appeal of Le Pen was summarised by
and Roger Eatwell in their 2018 book, National Populism:In 2017, Marine Le Pen campaigned on the slogan ‘Neither right nor left’, attacking globalization and stating that ‘Our leaders chose globalization, which they wanted to be a happy thing. It turned out to be a horrible thing.’ Where Le Pen diverges from the historic left is in how this critique of globalization is infused with strident opposition to immigration. In her words, ‘economic globalization, which refuses any regulation … sets the conditions for another form of globalization: Islamist fundamentalism’.
Her brand of economic protectionism, cultural conservatism, and opposition to Islamism imported by decades of mass migration, plays well with the public after almost a decade of Macron’s En Marche! establishmentism. Before the judgment, Le Pen polled at 37 percent, and her likely replacement, Jordan Bardella, at 36 percent.
France’s judiciary is explicitly political — and doesn’t keep up the pretence of impartiality while engaging in activism, as judges in the UK and United States tend to do. In 2013, judges assembled a “Wall of Bastards/jerks” in the Paris office of the Magistrates Union, featuring the photographs of politicians, including former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and stickers from National Front (the predecessor to National Rally).
As my friend and former MEP
has suggested, OLAF (the EU’s ostensible anti-corruption body) selectively weaponise financial compliance laws against Eurosceptic parties, while turning a blind eye to funds vanishing in parties which support the Commission’s agenda.
Remainer journalist Michael Crick suggested as much on Times Radio after the verdict, saying the Liberal Democrats were rerouting funds from MEPs to local election campaigns, but that nobody took action against the party because they supported the European project.
“Europe was being used to fund British politics… everybody in the European Parliament was at it.”
Like the rest of the West, France’s lawyers see anything less than revolutionary leftist politics as beneath contempt.
This week on The Weekly Wrap, Luke and I discussed how the so-called “rule of law” is, in practice, the rule of lawyers — and therefore the rule of whichever ideology has successfully captured the sitting judiciary.
You can listen to the full episode on YouTube or via
:
Why have those priding themselves on defending democracy yet again resorted to judicial activism, lawfare, and trying to deprive the discontented public of an alternative to vote for — just as Democrats attempted with Donald Trump?
Well, to remind you of what is really meant by “democracy”, we must revisit an essay on the subject that I wrote for Courage Media:
What we must understand is that “democracy” to Democrats means something very different than one man, one vote. As Emily Finley explains in The Ideology of Democratism, those who exalt democracy as a shared ideal are “enchanted with an imaginative vision of democracy that at times is almost indistinguishable from religious belief”. The way Democrats speak of democracy when criticizing Donald Trump is akin to worshipping it as a good until itself; rather than preferring it as a process by which political representatives are selected with maximum accountability.
Finley explains the logic of these “Democratists” as follows:
[The] belief that the people are generally good leads to the idea that the people must only be awakened through some form of enlightenment to their true and rational interests. Then, it is assumed, they will elect leaders representing the policies that correspond with those interests. It is always assumed that the people’s best interests align with those valued by democratism. Politics is a matter of correct reasoning and judgment rather than a moral-ethical challenge.
Democracy is premised on the belief that human beings share an egalitarian nature, and are equipped with rational faculties to reach the same conclusion about what is in their best interest. Therefore, mass enfranchisement will produce a uniform, predictable, progressive outcome. Hence why Democrats abhor anyone imposing identity verification requirements, proof of citizenship, civics tests, or other criteria on access to voting.
The presumption that we all share interests derived from our egalitarian nature is why Adam Grant, also in the New York Times, wrote an essay advocating government by random lot, originally titled “Elections Are Bad for Democracy”. The article ends with:
The lifeblood of a democracy is the active participation of the people. There is nothing more democratic than offering each and every citizen an equal opportunity to lead.
A random sampling of people will produce more progressive outcomes, according to Grant, because their natures have not been warped by interfacing with the institutions which produce politicians. The less contaminated by civilization man is, the better qualified they will be to govern according to our identical interests.
This belief in an egalitarian human nature is derived from the Enlightenment. Kamala Harris’ Marxist heritage has been well publicized. Marx believed man’s behavior is a product of economic circumstance. Were it not for the inequality engineered by greedy capitalists, man would be able to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner”, with equitable outcomes in all his ventures. But the majority of Democrats couldn’t quote from Das Kapital, and yet still act as if this bogus anthropology is true. This is because the very same version of human nature found in Marxism is shared by classical liberalism.
Finley finds the foundations of democracy in the three preeminent classical liberal thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. For Hobbes, man’s state of nature was bellum omnium contra omnes: a war off all against all, driven by libido dominandi — a desire for conquest, and to avoid death. He advocated an absolute sovereign be given power to arbitrate all disputes, and to “reduce all their wills by plurality of voices unto one will; which is as much as to say, to appoint one man or assembly of men to bear their person”. This subjugation of competing visions of the good under one appears to be the origin of the idea of representative governance.
Locke, the favored philosopher of America’s founders, stated all men originated in “a state of perfect freedom” and “perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another”. Man left this state of nature to construct a state by consensus, compromising on some of his freedom to protect private property, and sacrificing equality to reduce material privation. The state and culture exist in an antagonistic relationship with individual citizens, for whom any limit on their freedom of will constitutes oppression.
This evolution in liberal thought led to Rousseau, who conceived of man’s state of nature as a Garden of Eden where individuals sated their appetites wholly independent of relationships with one another. They had material abundance and were free from responsibilities — until “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine” ruined it for everyone. Rousseau believed “that man is naturally good and that it is from [our] institutions alone that men become wicked”. If only a state with unrestricted jurisdiction, working in the presumed best interest — the “General Will” — of everyone, could confiscate property, to hold all in common, we would remember how we were once all free and equal again.
What all three thinkers share is the belief that human beings are tabula rasa — blank slates, onto which education, economic circumstances, culture, and institutions transcribe beliefs and behaviors. The horrors of the Holocaust, and legislative victories of the Civil Rights movement, made this human egalitarianism the de facto cultural assumption in America. From this anthropology do Democrats derive both their unending crusade of antiracism, and their mandate to accrue more powers to the federal government to act on behalf of American citizens. Progressivism, then, is the use of technology, culture, and state power to reduce the limits placed on the freedom of the individual by material conditions and social bonds. What we are progressing toward is a reversion to the State of Nature, in which we were all free and equal — in the imagination of Democrats.
Democracy, then, to Democrats, means: the system by which man’s free and equal nature is revealed to him, and expressed in identical fashion. As such, voting in a democracy is thought to be an exercise of everyone making the same choice over and over. As in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We:
Tomorrow is the day for the annual election of the Benefactor. […]
It goes without saying that this has no resemblance to the disorderly, unorganized elections in ancient times, when—it’s hard to say this with a straight face—they couldn’t even tell before the election how it would come out. To establish a state on the basis of absolutely unpredictable randomness, blindly—could there be anything more idiotic? […]
I don’t suppose it’s necessary to say that here, as in everything else, we have no place for randomness; there can’t be any surprises. […]
we celebrate our elections openly, honestly, in the daylight. I see how everybody votes for the Benefactor and everybody sees how I vote for the Benefactor. And how else could it be, since everybody and I add up to the one We?
Anyone who disagrees with their fairy-tale vision of all mankind having equal outcomes, and free from the recognition of differences, is “a threat to democracy”. This is why Democrats’ rhetoric has led to efforts to censor, imprison, and even kill Donald Trump.
The 2018 Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy states that politicians like Trump have produced a “post-truth” populist politics, easily remedied by making voters better educated. Rousseau believed that:
If, when the people, being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another, the grand total of the small differences would always give the general will, and the decision would always be good.
If not exposed to mis- and dis-information peddled by “divisive” populists like Trump, Democrats presume everyone will come to the same progressive conclusion. They believe themselves to be in possession of the means of making policies in everyone’s rational self-interest, based on a presumption of universal human sameness. Populism is the art of returning contentious issues back to the realm of public discussion. Populists are therefore slowing down the rate at which policies which benefit everyone will be enacted. They are casting a kind of spell over the voting public, making them believe they are different and divided. For democracy to prevail, populists must be censored, banned, and persecuted.
You can also read this piece on
:In short: our Enlightened elite know what is best for all of humanity, because the anthropology of liberalism and socialism provides them with a blueprint to make decisions which benefit us all.
Therefore, they can demand we distrust our instincts, censor our speech, stage-manage electoral politics, and persecute their opponents — and thereby achieve an egalitarian utopia.
Until we disillusion ourselves of the belief in the blank slate, and the equally delusional notion of impartial institutions and a “rule of law” applied independent of the ideology of magistrates, we remain powerless to oppose this ongoing revolution in all our respective countries.
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