With Marine Le Pen’s conviction for embezzlement on Monday, France has become the latest country to have a national political campaign take a detour into the law courts. In the USA, the first phase of last year’s presidential election centred on Donald Trump’s successful manoeuvres to delay the most serious criminal procedures against him. Now the shape of France’s 2027 campaign hinges on whether Le Pen can successfully appeal her prison sentence and a five-year banishment from political life. A decision from the Paris Court of Appeals is expected in the summer of 2026.
For the moment, Le Pen’s chances of success look slim. Her National Rally party was caught red-handed illegally diverting into party coffers more than €4 million designated for the support of its European Parliament delegation. But regardless of the case’s ultimate outcome, it will very likely generate a stress test for French democracy, heightening polarisation and threatening the legitimacy of key institutions. As we have seen from similar cases around the world, even when trials of political figures are fully warranted, the results for democracy can still be disastrous.
First consider the American cases. In the eyes of most Democrats, the procedures against Trump proved that he was a corrupt, criminal figure, entirely unfit to hold high office. On the principle that no person is above the law, they believed he deserved trial and conviction for trying to overthrow the US government, for criminally mishandling secret government documents, and for illegally bribing a porn star to stay quiet about an affair. And they had a strong case. Many of them also supported the Colorado Supreme Court when it dubiously attempted, without a trial, to bar Trump from the state’s presidential ballot on the grounds that the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment prohibits insurrectionists from running for office (the US Supreme Court overruled that decision last March).
For most Republicans, on the other hand, it was not Trump that the trials called into question, but the justice system itself. It had been corrupted, weaponised, and transformed into a vehicle of “lawfare”. Trump’s offences, they believed, were either a figment of the liberal imagination, or trivial, the sort of harmless peccadillos that would have earned anyone else only the lightest possible reprimand. An old hand at evading prosecution, Trump ultimately slithered out of all but one set of indictments — the bribery charges on which a New York City jury found him guilty, but which failed to hurt him in the polls or lead to a prison sentence. But Trump’s success did nothing to quell his supporters’ suspicions of the legal system — or of the federal government in general.
Procedures of this sort are all the more fraught because the law is never entirely neutral — in real life, an entirely abstract and objective set of rules never applies to all in exactly the same manner. In practice, prosecutors always enjoy discretion as to whether to prosecute, and how to prosecute. It is hardly unheard of for them to seek an excessively severe penalty for a lesser offence because they don’t think they can obtain a conviction for a more serious one. It would be nice to think that political considerations never influence their decisions, but when prosecutors from one party target defendants from another, suspicions of political motivation can be hard to dismiss. In the case of the Manhattan “hush money” case, even many liberal commentators criticised District Attorney Alvin Bragg for overreach.
To be sure, the Democrats hardly have a monopoly on possible prosecutorial overreach. When Attorney General Pam Bondi recently threatened to charge people caught destroying Teslas with “domestic terrorism”, she zoomed straight past mere overreach into flagrant prosecutorial abuse. Trump’s blithe forgiveness of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for endangering American pilots in “Signalgate”, after threatening ad nauseam to have Hillary Clinton “locked up” for a far less serious breach of national security, is only the most recent example of his own massive hypocrisy when it comes to the justice system.
Another depressing example of how even entirely justified trials of politicians can corrode democracy comes from Israel. In 2019, a court indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on well-substantiated charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Of course, Netanyahu and his conservative base claimed that the prosecution was both baseless and politically motivated. Even as the legal procedures ground on (they have not yet reached a conclusion), Netanyahu’s government proposed sweeping changes to the Israeli judiciary, which would strip the court system of much of its autonomy. These moves, clearly related to Netanyahu’s own vested interest in staying out of jail, prompted the largest protests in Israeli history, and further polarisation of an already furiously divided country. Last week, Netanyahu upped the ante even more by moving to dismiss Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who had opposed his changes to the judiciary. Today, with Netanyahu all the more desperate to stay in power to avoid not only the corruption trial, but answering for Israel’s horrific intelligence and defence failures on October 7, Israeli democracy looks more fragile than ever.
Yet another recent example comes from Romania, where in November the constitutional court annulled the first round of voting in the presidential election because of blatant Russian interference. Last month, the country’s electoral commission followed up on the decision by barring independent Right-wing candidate Călin Georgescu, who had come first in that vote, from a future ballot. The events risk deepening the country’s political turmoil.
The case of Marine Le Pen could well produce a similar outcome in France, even as it illustrates a related problem with the prosecution of political figures. The fact is that standards as to what constitutes corruption have changed greatly in the past two decades or so. Through the end of the 20th century, France’s Fifth Republic tended to treat certain forms of relatively petty corruption essentially as perks of office. During François Mitterrand’s two terms as president, his mistress and their daughter lived rent free in a spacious government apartment. The fact was widely known in Parisian circles but prompted no judicial action. No-show parliamentary jobs served as a convenient way of steering extra funds into party coffers or family pockets. But in the past quarter-century, what was once winked at has become sternly punished. In 2011, a Paris court found former president Jacques Chirac guilty of embezzlement in a case involving no-show jobs and gave him a two-year suspended prison sentence. Courts have now found Chirac’s successor Nicolas Sarkozy guilty in two separate corruption cases. With Sarkozy already under a version of house arrest, and wearing an electronic bracelet, authorities this past week requested a seven-year prison term for him for accepting illegal Libyan assistance in his 2007 presidential campaign.
Ironically, one of the political figures who called most stridently for imposing stricter corruption standards in French politics was Marine Le Pen herself. In the early 2000s, as she prepared to take over the party from her dreadful father, its founder Jean-Marie, she deployed the slogan “Hands clean, heads high” to distinguish what was then called the National Front from the mainstream parties. In a televised appearance in 2004, she exclaimed: “Everyone has stolen money except for the National Front! And they say it’s normal, not serious! They say the French are sick of hearing about it. But the French are not sick of hearing about it. They’re sick of it happening!” These attacks formed part of her successful strategy to “de-demonise” the Front and expand its appeal beyond the extreme Right. The morning after Le Pen’s sentencing, the Communist newspaper L’Humanité led with the headline, “Hands dirty, heads low.” The French idiom “l’arroseur arrosé” (“hoist by one’s own petard”) would also have worked.
“Through the end of the 20th century, France’s Fifth Republic tended to treat certain forms of relatively petty corruption essentially as perks of office.”
But as a result of the sentencing, what is now called the National Rally may well end up “re-demonising” itself as it fights to turn French public opinion against the court and denounces “political justice”. In televised appearances after the verdict, Le Pen and her faithful railed against the “tyranny of the judges” (a line frequently heard of late from Elon Musk in the US as well) and reverted to the violent rhetoric of the party’s early days. Le Pen herself claimed that “the system has brought out a nuclear bomb… the people who are always talking about the rule of law are generally the first to violate the rule of law”. Her supporters fancifully compared her to the murdered Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, and to victims of political persecution in Iran and Venezuela. The publications and media outlets owned by conservative mogul Vincent Bolloré (especially CNews, France’s version of Fox News) have incessantly echoed the charges, trying to mobilise as much of the population as possible against “the system”.
Will the sentencing of Le Pen follow the American and Israeli patterns and end up damaging democracy and benefitting another Right-wing politician-turned-criminal-defendant? Possibly not. The fury on the Right could die down well before the 2027 election. And the National Front/National Rally has suffered from many debilitating bouts of internecine warfare in the past — including Marine Le Pen against both her father, and her niece Marion Maréchal. If the appeals court upholds Le Pen’s sentence, her 29-year-old protégé Jordan Bardella might unite an enraged party behind him. In another scenario, rivals might fall on him and cause a damaging split. At this point, anything is possible.
But French democracy is in a fragile state. President Emmanuel Macron is deeply unpopular. Budget constraints are putting pressure on the economy and raising the spectre of social unrest, even as the unravelling of the Western alliance has led Macron to request significantly increased military spending. A minority government under Prime Minister François Bayrou is stumbling forward only at the sufferance of the National Rally and Marine Le Pen. And she could withdraw her support at any moment.
France does not need more instability. Unfortunately, though, it’s not always possible to reconcile the need for political peace with the needs of justice. While prosecutors should always take the possible political consequences of their actions into account, and examine their own political motivations for filing charges, they can’t ignore glaring cases of criminality. Were American prosecutors supposed to ignore January 6? The ridiculous national security breaches that included keeping top-secret documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom? Yet tragically, their attempted prosecutions of Trump probably contributed to his victory, and his subsequent full-blown assault on the country’s democratic institutions. Few weapons in Trump’s ideological arsenal have proven as deeply effective — and corrosive of democracy — as the charge of “lawfare”. The French can only hope and pray that the sentencing of Marine Le Pen does not have similar consequences.
