Lawfare a la Francaise

Marine Le Pen joins Donald Trump and others whom prosecutors have tried to keep out of office with criminal indictments. There’s no better way to get voters to support her than to prosecute her.

Marine Le Pen speaks on French TV channel TF1 after her conviction. Picture: AFP.

“If you can’t beat ’em, try ’em,” might as well be the motto of the age. So it is that France’s Marine Le Pen joins Donald Trump, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and plenty of others in the pantheon of political insurgents whom prosecutors have tried to keep out of office with criminal indictments.

A Paris court on Monday sentenced Ms. Le Pen, leader of the insurgent-right National Rally, to a four-year prison sentence, with two years suspended and the rest to be served under house arrest or electronic monitoring. It also blocked her from running for the presidency in 2027.

Her crime is said to involve misuse and embezzlement of allowances provided for members of the European Parliament to hire assistants. She allegedly diverted the money for party purposes rather than parliamentary uses, though there’s conceivably overlap between the two. Ms. Le Pen has denied wrongdoing.

All of which means the case bears two hallmarks of modern political lawfare, which is that the details are a legal stretch and will be incomprehensible to most voters who lack the time or inclination to parse complex regulations governing political expenditures. Americans still confused by Alvin Bragg’s New York prosecution of Mr. Trump on obscure and dubious campaign-finance violations know the feeling.

And that’s before you get to selective enforcement: Other members of the European Parliament have stumbled over the vague financial rules at issue in this case. Follow the Money, an investigative news outlet, reported that, between 2019 and 2022, 139 European lawmakers, nearly one in five, likely misused the allowance that supposedly tripped up Ms. Le Pen. In the National Rally case, prosecutors dredged up allegations related to transactions as long ago as 2004.

In most of those European Parliament cases, the controversy ended after the lawmakers repaid the money. Le Monde reports that Ms. Le Pen repaid €330,000 in 2023 with no admission of guilt. Yet French prosecutors and the court have now thrown the book at Ms. Le Pen and also imposed a €2 million fine on National Rally.

Ms. Le Pen’s real crime in the eyes of traditional politicians and media is her popularity. She has gained ground in successive presidential elections, and opinion polls suggest she’d stand a good chance of winning the presidency in the next election in 2027. This worries and offends mainstream types who remember the party’s sordid earlier history of antisemitism (which Ms. Le Pen would say she’s trying to purge) and take umbrage at her successful campaigns against, well, them.

There are many reasons to be wary about Ms. Le Pen’s policy ideas, and the rise of the radical-socialist left suggests French voters aren’t sold on National Rally as the only alternative to the mainstream. But ample evidence around the world suggests there’s no better way to goad voters into supporting Ms. Le Pen than to prosecute her. The French authorities are playing straight into her main political pitch, which is that she speaks truths that “the establishment” doesn’t want voters to hear.

Maybe one of these days the world’s champions of democracy will trust democracy, rather than trying — and often failing — to win elections in the courtroom.