Le Pen Est Plus Fort Que La Loi

The Pen is mightier than the law?

A Marine Le Pen poster from the 2017 election

So the French courts have found Marine Le Pen and various others guilty of “embezzlement” regarding EU funds she spent as an MEP in 2004-2016. The charges are, to put it bluntly, iffy, and almost certainly Le Pen is no more guilty of these charges than every other French MEP with domestic political ambitions (i.e. almost all of them) in the last few decades - and probably almost every MEP from every country in fact. As has been noted in various places other French politicians have been accused of the same offenses:

Pierre Lellouche, a lawyer and former Deputy of the French National Assembly, appeared on CNEWS to point out that the current prime minister, François Bayrou, faced the same charge and suffered no consequences.

“Then, last but not least, there is the case of (François) Bayrou, the current prime minister, who has been prosecuted for exactly the same thing, i.e., for abuses of party funding declared as parliamentary assistants in Europe, at the EU parliament. Bayrou emerged from this affair without being in the least concerned. In fact, the public prosecutor’s office has once again referred the matter to the courts, but even so, we’re dealing with a double standard here. It’s a bit surprising.”

What this boils down to is that the EU gravy train allows MEPs a generous budget to pay for assistants and the like. These assistants are often party members in the MEP’s home country and, amazingly, they often spend time on work that seems tenuously connected to the EU. [Amusingly and ironically, the UK’s Nigel Farage, who certainly had UKIP members employed similarly, probably escapes guilt in this regard because those people’s time spent campaigning for Brexit was exactly what Farage entered the European Parliament to do. ]

So it’s a BS charge. Moreover even some of Le Pen’s political opponents in France can see that this is a bad precedent:

Media reported that centrist Prime Minister François Bayrou was "troubled" by the ruling against Marine Le Pen, although he did not intend to make a public statement on the matter.

"The choice to dismiss an elected official should only belong to the people," said Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far-left France Unbowed (LFI).

And Laurent Wauquiez, of the right-wing Republicans, said that the decision would "weigh very heavily on the functioning of our democracy".

"It's undoubtedly not the route that should have been taken."

Now I have just a smidgen of Gallic cynicism about these political statements. It occurs to me, and will also undoubtedly occur to many in France, that it is remarkably convenient for the judiciary to do this as it allows the politicians to offer the sort of “thoughts and prayers (and #hashtags)” support they love without needing to actually do anything. And the judiciary can correctly point out that they are just imposing the penalties defined in the law passed by the legislature and everyone can shrug their shoulders, say it’s a tragedy and try to move on happy in the knowledge that they have just disqualified the woman who was the easy front runner in the election in two year’s time.

The problem they have is that we can all see through the charade.

Some (many?) of the roughly 25% of the electorate who voted for Le Pen in 2022 and for her NR party in last year’s parliamentary election are going to feel that they have been disenfranchised by this decision. I expect a significant number of sympathizers who didn’t vote in either will also become energized by this as well. This could lead to the usual unrest over the spring and summer.

A good test will be seeing what happens during the Easter holidays in a couple of weeks. The RN has strong support outside greater Paris and many of its supporters (and many others as well) absolutely despise the Parisiens who they believe misrule the nation. Blocking roads and railways so that Parisiens are unable to go on their holiday trips to the countryside - especially the south - seems like a fairly obvious move. Interfering with air traffic another - though the French ATC unions are solidly lefty I believe so that might not happen.

Worse for the ruling elites, the RN are the largest party in the French Parliament and the current minority government survives on the fact that the RN is willing to let them as the Spectator points out (original):

There may be other more immediate repercussions. Le Pen’s party could join the left in bringing a motion of no confidence in Bayrou’s coalition government. They did it in December, to topple Michel Barnier, but this year she has been more conciliatory. Not now.

I would be entirely unsurprised if a no confidence motion is in the offing and quite likely some blunt messaging to go with it that the RN will oppose everything and may possibly be able to force another general election. My guess is that if they do force an election they will win very close to a majority if not an outright majority and that will force Macron to work with them somehow. The RN are, I believe, in a better position than AfD across the Rhine and attempts to form a rainbow “anything but the RN” coalition are likely to fail. Not least because (some of) Melanchon’s far left lot are at least as repugnant to the mainstream parties and some of their likely conditions for joining a coalition are going to be unacceptable to the politicians on the center/right. I think there’s a pretty good chance that the RN will enter government one way or another - none of the other parties want another general election, especially one which the RN is going to dominate, so they may well come up with some fig leaf that lets them claim to not be working with the RN but actually be doing so.

Critically, although a French president has considerable powers to rule by decree, Macron can’t do so entirely for the next two years. So he probably has to work with the RN for a bit. If he’s smart he’ll work grudgingly and blame the RN for everything that goes wrong. Unfortunately for him, Macron has repeatedly shown that he is not politically smart so the more likely outcome is that he is seen as sabotaging the RN - just as his judiciary is today sabotaging Le Pen’s presidential campaign - and the RN reap the sympathy vote.

What’s next?

Low probability is that the RN’s supporters kick off effectively a civil war because the authorities crack down on their protests. I consider this unlikely for various reasons including the fact that many within the forces that would be used to crack down sympathize with the RN. I’m not quite sure what happens if the government attempts to crack down and many of the cracker-downers decide to take the side of the RN, but I doubt it is good. However I believe the heads of these forces are aware of the issue and are smart enough to not let things get to that point. If Macron gets huffy about them not cracking down, then I expect them to find a reason to ignore him and/or not crack down hard at all while pretending to follow orders. If he continues to push we head into constitutional crisis if not coup/civil war as his underlings refuse to comply and perhaps decide that he’s the problem. But I think people will tell him to stop pushing behind the scenes so we don’t get there.

However I consider it a fairly high probability that there will be protests. Lots and lots of them and that they will be very disruptive. It is possible that they will be so disruptive as to cause the general public to turn against the RN, but I suspect not. Thinking back to the Gillets Jaunes protests of a few years ago, I expect the protests to be generally supported by the population. Macron, we note, is about as popular as Senile Joe Biden was a year ago with over two-thirds of France disapproving of him.

It is a given that the RN and Le Pen will seek to overturn the ban on standing for election. I expect the judiciary to effectively do the French builder trick of a shrug and a claim that although, theoretically, such a thing could happen, in this case other concerns apply and that they might just manage to get around to hearing the appeal sometime in late 2027. I do not expect this to do down well. Even if the politicians are lying when they say they think this is bad, a large part of the French population - even ones who are not sympathetic to Le Pen - will think it’s a political hit job and she’s being picked on by the establishment because she threatens their “democracy”.

Assuming the appeals to overturn fail and that the RN and allies get their ducks in a row about who stands in her place, I predict that person - probably either Marion Maréchal (le Pen), her niece, or more likely Jordan Bardella, the 29-year-old president of the National Rally (RN) - will come up with a strategy that evades the legal issues but still puts Marine Le Pen in government. For example, I believe there is no requirement that the Prime Minister have a seat in the legislature so an obvious ploy is for this person to promise to make Le Pen prime minister. If I’m wrong about that, I’m fairly sure there are other ways to achieve the same end - namely that Le Pen will still have major influence on the next President and government.

What I do expect is that the French establishment will attempt even more ways to rid themselves of this troublesome woman. I expect those ways to rebound negatively, in much the same ways that the lawfare did on OrangeManBad, but I doubt that will occur to them. The problem the French establishment faces is that Le Pen and the RN, unlike the AfD in Germany, is fairly long established - Le Pen has been standing for election for President since 2012, when she came third, and has been in second place for the last two elections with her share of the vote increasing each time. Before her, her father came second to Chirac in 2002 (and might have won except that the left decided they’d rather vote for the crook than the “fascist’¹ «Votez escroc, mais pas facho!»). Her party has won and governed municipalities and (IIRC) regions of the country for over a decade now and have entirely failed to be the fascists that they were (are) claimed to be by the establishment. Bluntly the establishment have been throwing the mud and hunting for crimes for two decades and failing to get anything to stick until this “embezzlement” conviction. The French electorate know who she is and who the RN are and can see quite clearly that the would be tyrant is the person currently occupying the Presidency.

A possible way out

It should be noted that it is possible part of the establishment will blink and stop this ruling. The French Constitutional Court is currently considering whether the ban on standing for election - even during an appeal - is legal:

Under the ban, Le Pen will not be removed from her seat in parliament until the end of her current term. She can also seek a last-minute reprieve from the French Constitutional Council, which is expected to hand a separate decision Friday on whether immediately barring elected officials from running for office is legal.

The new head of that court - Richard Ferrand, a close political ally of Macron - was only approved to the role by a single vote, and that after the RN members abstained. Interestingly the constitutional court was expected to issue its ruling on the ban before Le Pen’s case was decided but for some reason that ruling was delayed. If Ferrand has the political smarts I think he may have, the reason the ruling was delayed will have been to see what happened in the Le Pen case. Now his court has to decide whether to reward the RN’s lack of opposition to his appointment with a ruling in their favor or not. I hope the court does rule that the ban prior to appeals finishing is illegal but I am not confident that it will.

PS Robert Malone is far less optimistic than I am and considers Macron to indeed be an anti-democratic tyrant. Worth reading

Evil Incarnate: Macron and Corruption

PPS - It occurs to me that the choice in 2002 «Votez escroc, mais pas facho!» has evolved so that in 2027 the slogan becomes «Votez Le Pen, ni escroc ni facho!»

1. Unlike Marine Le Pen, her father Jean-Marie could be credibly painted as fascist-adjacent and anti-Semitic. Marine Le Pen is probably Peronist and is demonstrably not anti-Semitic