On Monday, I found a criminal court in France Marine Le Pen Concilled with embezzlement, and preventing her from running for the French presidency in 2027. Le Pen, the right -wing right leader in the national gathering, was the political party previously known as the National Front, leading the first round Presidential election polls. This national gathering is now possible to run Jordan Bardela, a member of the twenty -nine -year -old European Parliament who has worked since 2022 as the party president. Barilla claimed that X was that the court ruling represents the “execution of French democracy”, a feeling that right -wing politicians around the world shares from Victor Urban to JD Vance. Although Le Pen was not accused of profit from embezzlement, the court convicted her of supervising a plan that raised her party with the European Union’s funds.
To help understand the scandal and what the court’s decision means to France, I recently spoke on the phone with Cécile Alduy, a professor of French studies at Stanford and an expert in the far right of the French. During our conversation, which was liberated for length and clarity, we discussed whether this decision supports or undermines French democracy, and how the extreme right can change under a new leader, and what the Trump administration can mean the second French policy to move forward.
How do you understand this decision? Do you think that this is a French court in the aftermath of the law, or an attempt to apply a double standard to a person that many people feel a threat to French democracy?
From all the documents that were shared through this investigation, and in comparison with other cases of embezzlement trials in France, in my opinion, it is very clear that this is the court that applies the law only. This is not the first case in France like this. There were other experiences about the embezzlement of the money distributed by the European Union to parliamentary assistants. Even the political party of the current French Prime Minister, Francois Bayro, has been investigated on similar charges. In recent months, some mayors in small cities in France have been convicted of the inability to act due to embezzlement. So it is not at all uncomfortable. It is the size of the amount that has been embezzled over many years, and the methodological nature of it is unique. This was the millions of euros used by the National Front, which was supposed to pay the salaries of parliamentary assistants, but in reality, the investigations conducted by the Political Party proved in its work.
So only to explain to the Americans how this works: a country in the European Union, such as France, gets a certain amount of money –
No, it’s not exactly this way. The European Parliament offers some money to every European actor so that they can employ parliamentarians who help collect files on specific policies they want to implement, which organize their business schedules and do things such as buying train tickets. The European Parliament gives the same amount of money to each deputy to make its jobs by employing a parliamentary assistant. The French National Front used this budget to employ parliamentarians, but they rarely appear in the European Parliament. In fact, they worked directly for the National Front in Paris, or sometimes locally in France. What has been proven through the investigation is that people have been appointed through this budget, but they have never worked for the purpose of a job description.
This decision raises a number of interesting questions about democracy, whether in France or in general, but perhaps the first is whether the candidates who were convicted of crimes should be allowed to run for positions. I understand that France is slightly different from the United States, for example, that politicians have been prevented from running for positions with some regularity. This is something that happened to Francois Fion, the former French Prime Minister. What is this case, and how do the French approach describe this issue?
You must condemn that you are forbidden to run. But there are two different aspects of this question. One of them is public opinion and depicting corruption in those cases, which can be harmful to the pictures of the candidates and prevent them even from nomination as soon as a scandal erupted. This was the case of Francois Fion. It is not yet condemned. A scandal to provide his wife with a fake function conducted by the French Parliament that broke out during the 2017 presidential campaign. It was so much that he had no chance, you know. Negen after that. It took a long time, in fact, to end the trial.
Then you have the issues of the candidates who were convicted by justice. Since 2016, the law has opened the possibility that any candidate convicted of embezzlement of public funds is immediately unqualified, and he cannot run. Most of what Marine Le Pen did before 2016. But the law left the potential that if you are convicted of your perpetrators, you can prevent you from practicing any public office or running for public positions. But you need to be condemned to implement it already. To this day, Marine Le Pen was a candidate that could have won even if there was a scandal, because her base was not very sensitive to this type of corruption, especially if she took money from the European Parliament. Its base is largely the anti -Europe union. Therefore, there is a distinction between the perception of these scandals and legal condemnation in this case.
Well, the political aspect may be quite similar to the United States, as Trump’s base does not really care if he is convicted of a crime. But the difference is that although he was convicted of a crime he can still run. Only to clarify Fillon, although it was banned from running, but this decision took some time to make, after 2017 and exceed it aside?
Yes, exactly. So this was after the 2017 elections. In that year, he ran in the first round of the elections, but he did not reach the surface flow. Then he was rejected by his political party. Three years later, he was officially convicted and prevented from running again.
I also collect something similar to former President Nicholas Sarkozy as well.
Yes. This conversation really gives a terrible picture of French politicians. However, yes, Sarkozy has ten different legal allowances for him at the present time.
There were a lot of comments from all over the political spectrum in France, including from Jean Luke Milinkon, the left leader, saying that this decision deprives voters of the ability to choose their president. But I explained many of the statements that I saw as not simply saying that French law should not prevent convicts from searching for his position but something stronger, meaning that this is the French system that chooses Marine Le Pen in some way. Do you think this would be a wide sense of France, even if you think the court was following the law here properly or fair?
This is exactly what Marin Lob itself and its party declares – it is political revenge. Frankly, I don’t really think this is the case, given the presence of trials for similar cases across the political spectrum, as I just emphasized, including Mélenchon, which is why he is not sympathetic to the judicial system. In this case, I think there are two different sides for this. There are politicians or even citizens who may actually believe to re -express the political spectrum in a huge way, because it was the main competition in the upcoming presidential elections, leaving a vacuum. There is a feeling that it has an impact on democracy. This does not necessarily mean that it is a mistake, though. She says that, well, there is something called the separation of powers, the judicial authority that exercises its authority, and every citizen is responsible under the law, and the law is applied equally to everyone. But there is an impact on democracy on how to play this.
