The fall of the Le Pen house

On March 31 of this year, the Paris court sentenced the far-right National Assembly (RN) - that is, Marine Le Pen and 24 other people, all from the RN (of which eight are high-ranking officials) - for the embezzlement of public funds of the European Parliament (the total amount of damage is more than 4,1 million euros), in the period from 2004 to 2016, in the affair of "fake assistants" of MEPs from the ranks of the RN. Namely, we are talking about an organized system for siphoning money from the European Parliament's grants for associates of elected deputies, and for the needs of financing the party itself, more precisely the enormous powers and other privileges of the innermost circle around Le Pen herself. That system was once established by Jean-Marie Le Pen, only to be effectively perfected by his daughter Marine Le Pen.

Le Pen herself was sentenced to four years in prison (two years in prison plus two suspended - prison converted into house arrest with a "nanoleg", as French law allows in sentences of up to two years), a fine of 100000 euros and, above all, a five-year ban on election to any public office with immediate effect/legal force.

WHAT THE LAW SAYS (THE LAW)

To begin with, this verdict, no matter how strict it is, followed a ten-year judicial investigation followed by the exhaustion of all possible procedural objections and complaints allowed by law, i.e. the entire pharmacy of legal remedies, and a two-month trial that ended at the end of last year.

Let's recall: after the relative "lawlessness" of the seventies and eighties, in recent decades France has significantly improved and, above all, tightened the legislation in the field of financing political life, starting from the political parties themselves to regulations on the disposal of public (budgetary) funds. The last improvement was introduced in the so-called Law Sapin 2 from December 2016 (named after the then Minister of Justice in the Government of François Hollande), which introduced additional and stricter provisions on "transparency and moralization of political life", with a special emphasis on the increasingly frequent conflicts of interest, evasion and embezzlement (of public money).

Namely, the adoption of this law, as well as the creation of the Special Prosecutor's Office for Financial Crime (PNF) and the High Council for the Transparency of Public Life (HATVP) at the end of 2013, are a direct consequence of the now famous "Kaizak" affair (Cahuzac), named after the left-wing minister of the budget at the time - Hollande's "white knight" in the fight against tax evasion - who not only lied to the president while looking him directly in the eye, but also blatantly lied to the entire parliament from the rostrum, saying that he did not own any million off-shore account despite the irrefutable evidence that was first presented by the journalists of the famous journalistic and investigative portal "Mediapart", the same one that in 2013 was the first to reveal the affair of the "fake assistants of the RN MEPs".

The "non-elective" provision (ineligibility) which has always existed in French law, until then it was only "optional" and the courts rarely pronounced it. However, since the mid-2s, and especially since the Sapen XNUMX Law, this accompanying verdict - with a variable time limit, along with other forms of sanctions (imprisonment and/or fines) - is now issued mandatorily, almost automatically, but still very rarely with the note "with immediate effect".

NEITHER FROM GRANDMOTHER NOR UNCLES

Of course, it was this "direct effect" that caused the biggest storm on the political scene, since it directly disqualifies Marine Le Pen from the race for the upcoming presidential elections in May 2027, in which some public opinion polls already give her 37 percent of the votes in the first round, apart from the fact that she has long been enjoying the status of an almost absolute favorite in the future presidential elections.

Namely, in the multi-hour reading of the verdict and its explanation on a full 154 pages, the president of the Judicial Council, according to lawyers and knowledgeable commentators, more than pedagogically argued the motives for such a harsh verdict. On the one hand, since justice is slow and appellate (second-degree) processes can drag on indefinitely, and considering the proven offense and its severity, the aim was to enable the immediate effectiveness of the verdict - from the legal side, completely unrelated to the electoral agenda of the convicted. Immediate validity is first of all a response (a cynic would say punishment) to the attitude of Le Pen and the other defendants during the investigation and trial, which was reflected in the complete denial of the crime they are accused of and complete contempt for the facts, regulations and presented evidence. For Marine Le Pen, it is not a case of serious multi-year embezzlement of public funds of the European Parliament in the amount of several million, but of an ordinary "administrative oversight", where it was said that she was not aware of the strict rules on spending money allocated by the European Parliament, as well as the consequences of their violation. Realizing that the "non-election" will be immediately effective, Marine Le Pen left the courtroom without listening to the end of the verdict and without saying a word to the gathered French and foreign media.

Passing a sentence commensurate with the crime committed, the judges only applied the existing law, which was tightened and unanimously adopted in Parliament by the same politicians, and Marine Le Pen, colloquially speaking, got what she deserved. To make the irony even greater, Marine Le Pen, as already known for her catchphrase "everyone steals but us", loudly demanded in 2013 that in cases of proven embezzlement of public funds, public officials caught "with their hands in jam" should be sentenced to "lifelong ineligibility". And what can we say about the legendary pre-election slogan of the National Front from the beginning of the nineties - "Clean hands and raised head"? Gone with the wind.

Despite the legally binding non-election, Marine Le Pen will retain her parliamentary mandate until its expiration or until the first subsequent dissolution of parliament, which is legally possible as early as July this year. But the matter immediately got complicated. At the unforced suggestion of the Minister of Justice (former Minister of Police), the notorious Gérald Darmanen, Le Pen filed an appeal against the first-instance verdict on the same day, and the Appellate Chamber of the Paris Court the very next day found just enough space in its jam-packed agenda, in which there is no time for a push-pause in the next two years, for the second-instance trial of Le Pen in 2026, as well as for the eventual pronouncement of the second-instance verdict in early summer 2026, which would mean that Marine Le Pen, if her "immediately valid ineligibility" is lifted, would still be able to participate in the presidential elections in the spring of 2027.

photo: ap photo

POLITICAL STORM

As someone recently remarked ironically, whenever a politician is tried in France - especially for acts from the sphere of financial crime - and regardless of the gravity of the crime and the sentence (or, God forbid, acquittal), everyone always asks themselves first, "does the court deal with politics when it judges politicians?" Upon the pronouncement of the verdict, MPs, membership and sympathizers of the RN above all, but also other right-wing leaders, including even some ministers in the Government, pulled out already well-coordinated self-victimizing verbal and intellectual acrobatics, substitution of theses, sophistry and other logical shenanigans from the arsenal of populist demagoguery. Thus, we could hear that "the system used an atomic bomb against the RN", that "judges are overturning the electoral will of citizens" (for now only in public opinion polls), that magistrates lead politics and interfere in elections, that we witness the "execution of democracy", and cries for witch hunts, political processes, the negation of democracy, the dictatorship/tyranny of judges... In a word, a circus, and to the general astonishment of the entire judiciary and legal profession, the entire left political camp and the larger part of the center, but also a large part of ordinary French citizens, who have long been fed up with the financial machinations of the entire political caste. Prime Minister Bajru himself expressed some confusion with Le Pen's verdict (while he himself expects a second-degree trial for a similar offense, in which his Modem party was caught), supporting all instances of judicial power as one of the three basic pillars of the republic. However, the most surprising was the unexpected reaction of the radical leftist leader of Unconquered France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who declared that "only the voters have the sovereign right to eliminate a candidate from the election race".

On the international level, Marine Le Pen received support from a list of all the leaders of the European extreme right - Orban, Salvini, Abaskal (yes, and Dodik), and Trump, Musk and company from the USA, just like the official Kremlin - to make the irony even greater, just at the moment when she identified herself with Alexei Navalny. The only noticeable absence of reaction is the German far-right AfD, which even Marine Le Pen considers too extreme.

Rallies and counter-rallies

A magnificent rally in support of Le Pen and the "struggle to preserve democracy against the dictatorship of the judiciary", which was called by the president of the RN, the youth Jordan Bardella, gathered on Sunday, April 6, at the foot of the Invalid building, barely more than 7000 supporters, during which Le Pen reiterated that she is not giving up the political struggle, daring to compare herself to Martin Luther King this time. No comment.

Many see the reason for this and more than weak response in the fear of riots and the American "capitol" scenario, but also in the opinion of the vast majority (57 percent) of French citizens that Le Pen's reduced sentence is perfectly fine and in accordance with the law. At the same time, a rally in defense of democracy at the invitation of Unconquered France, on the Place de la République - the place of all the protests of the French left - gathered even fewer participants (around 5000), while the last rally, at the invitation of former Prime Minister Atal and Macron's ruling coalition gathered around the central formation "Renaissance", managed to barely fill the congress hall on the outskirts of Paris, all in an effort to gather the troops, count them and encourage them for new political challenges extremely weakened political center.

PLAN B - LIKE A BROTEL

If Le Pen remains out of politics - at least electoral politics - for the next five years, it is logical to expect tectonic shifts on the right and far-right side of the French political spectrum. As a logical successor in the elections, the current young leader of the party, Jordan Bardella (29), a thoroughbred apparatchik and a kind of "creation" of Marine Le Pen, who tirelessly, despite the circumstances, "elevates" him to the heavens. But behind the cute and polished figure of the "ideal son-in-law" and the popularity of every prominent social media influencer, Bardeli, in addition to sweet-talking populism, also hides political inexperience, superficiality and undisguised dilettantism towards the challenges of the highest state positions. Nevertheless, his rating more and more often surpasses that of Marine Le Pen herself, and a large part of the membership and supporters of the RN is ready for the long-awaited change of generations at the top (after Le Pen's three previous failures in the presidential race) and finally "turning the page" and putting an end to the fifty-year era of the family party factory of the Le Pens at the head of the RN.

SHAKEN FOUNDATIONS OF DEMOCRACY

The sharp and worrying slide to the right of the entire French political landscape has been completely exposed by the latest turmoil and right-wing attacks on the basic principles of the republican order in France, namely the division, or at least the balance of the three branches of power: legislative, executive and judicial. The extremely poisonous and equally popular, "classic" right-wing minister of the interior, Republican Bruno Retajo, who on the right would potentially benefit the most from Marine Le Pen's exit from the game, dared to declare last fall that "the rule of law is by no means the be-all and end-all", and that this concept should not be adhered to, colloquially speaking, like a drunkard. In France, the increasingly present and domesticated political argumentation is far more characteristic of illiberal and facade democracies, and the proliferation of increasingly distorted notions of the very essence of democracy in France indicates the urgent need to calm the accumulated tensions and define some kind of new consensus and establish a new social contract that would determine the future path of the democratic currents of French politics and the aspirations of the entire French society.

WHERE IS THE END OF THE AFFAIRS??

For the sake of a political-judicial anecdote, let's also mention that at the moment this text was written (Tuesday, April 8), the defense of former President Nicolas Sarkozy presented his closing argument before the same Paris court, at the trial in the affair of the "Libyan financing" of his election campaign in 2007, that is, for the "corrupt pact concluded with Gaddafi's dictatorial regime" (the figure of 50 million euros is mentioned) for which the Special Prosecutor's Office requested seven years in prison for the former president for financial crime. Sarkozy appeared in court freshly "adorned" with a nanowire, after the final finality of the conviction for one year in prison in an earlier trial for influence peddling in the "Bismuth" affair from 2014. The first-instance verdict is expected in the fall. It will certainly not be difficult for the reader to assume that "Mediapart" was the first to write about these obscure connections between Sarkozy and Gaddafi back in 2012.

Instead of drawing a line, let's just remind you that two French former presidents - Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, and their prime ministers Alain Juppe and Francois Fillon, were definitively convicted of various types of embezzlement, corruption, fraud and evasion of public funds, in other words, violations of the basic principles of honesty and probity that even the smallest public office carries.