The global far right now has a new victim of the system. "I am Marine!" declared Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán after learning of the corruption conviction of National Rally leader and far-right muse Marine Le Pen. Elon Musk told X that "when the radical left cannot win through democratic voting, it abuses the legal system to imprison its opponents"; and Matteo Salvini, from Rome, linked the corruption conviction of the French far-right leader with the ban on ultra-nationalist Calin Georgescu running in Romania's upcoming presidential elections. Even Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov condemned the sentence as "a violation of democratic norms."
The process of victimization is underway. The French justice system considers that Le Pen was central to a "system" of embezzlement that diverted European funds to his party between 2004 and 2016 – in a practice of fictitious hiring extended to a large part of the French parliamentary spectrum, as explained by the journalist Jean Quatremer in his book The salutes of Europe–. The sentence finds her "guilty of complicity in embezzlement during her term as party president" and imposes a prison sentence, which will now be appealed. But, unlike the convicted Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen could be disqualified from running in the next French presidential elections. And this decision not only challenges the headquarters, who speak of an "assassination of democracy" or a "judicial coup," but also a large part of the conservative right that has criticized the ruling. The political and social fracture in France is somewhat deeper today.
Régroupe Nationale is the force that sustains François Bayrou's weak government in parliament and is the largest party, in terms of number of seats, in the European Parliament. The Le Pen clan is at the heart of the radicalization of French and European politics over the last quarter of a century. From the ultra-right, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigration rhetoric of Jean-Marie, a pioneer of the far right in the European Parliament, to the reconversion and "de-demonization" deployed by Marine, the party has acquired unprecedented power in France. If in 2012 the National Front entered the Assembly with only two seats, in the second round of the 2022 presidential elections Le Pen obtained 41.5% of the vote.
National Rally has grown out of a deep distrust in the system, and this condemnation reinforces the rhetoric of a democracy under suspicion. The European far right speaks of a "declaration of war." National Rally is the party that had established itself as the defender of individual freedoms and the rhetoric of security, based on law and order. Marine Le Pen—self-proclaimed representative of the "France of the forgotten"—had managed to seize parliamentary control in a France where the discontent of those suspicious of Macron Bonaparte (as journalist Jean-Dominique Merchet calls him in his book) has not stopped growing. Jean-Marie's daughter, who entered politics with the rhetoric of "clean hands" against the traditional political class, now faces the consequences of the illegal financing of a party that had already been in the spotlight for bank loans from Russia. This also stems from the decades-long ties between Jean-Marie Le Pen and the ultra-nationalist leader Vladimir Zherinovsky, with whom he shared anti-Semitism. But the judicial blow comes precisely when the National Regrouping is more consolidated than ever; with a reactionary Europe that feels empowered and capable of transforming any scenario of uncertainty into the perfect argument for identity-based discourse; and that shares (also with Putin) the thesis of the decline of multicultural societies and of a European democracy in decline and contested by its traditional allies.
The French political scientist Aurelien Mondon theorized long ago about the idea of reactionary democracyThe borders of democracies are porous, and the theses of the far right have managed to establish themselves in the center. And now, in the midst of a global wave rewriting the idea of democracy, France finds itself facing a clash between politics and justice, which will fuel the shadow of suspicion over an increasingly weakened system.
