Why Marine Le Pen should be allowed to run for president
BETWEEN 2004 and 2016, Marine Le Pen was at the heart of a scheme that diverted European Union funds to pay her party’s political staff, falsely claiming that they were working as assistants to its deputies in the European Parliament. Thus ruled a Paris court on March 31st, sentencing Ms Le Pen and 23 other officials of her hard-right National Rally (RN) party to a mix of fines, prison terms and bans from campaigning. The decision has landed in French politics like a bomb, owing to one aspect of Ms Le Pen’s sentence: she is barred for five years from running for office, with immediate effect. That would include the presidential election in 2027, in which she is the front-runner.
The RN’s leader and her populist allies have attacked the ruling as a political stitch-up. That claim is false and it undermines faith in the rule of law. There is no reason to think the verdict was improperly reached. The evidence is voluminous, the law is clear and there are no serious allegations of judicial bias. The court’s independence should be respected. Nonetheless, although blocking Ms Le Pen from running for president is perfectly legal, it risks undermining the legitimacy of the next election. That is the wrong trade-off for France. If an appeals court can shorten the ban and allow her to campaign in 2027, it should.
Ms Le Pen’s suspension from running for office raises two questions. First, in what circumstances should a democracy disqualify a candidate? Ms Le Pen’s sentence stems in part from a tough law France passed in 2016 to overcome its long-standing leniency towards corrupt politicians, including Jacques Chirac, an ex-president. That law permits banning candidates from running for political office, with immediate effect. Ms Le Pen supported the reform, and it is rich for her to claim that its penalties, when applied to her, are themselves an assault on democracy.
Most countries have laws that can block candidates, but mainly for grave attacks on democracy itself. After the Maidan revolution Ukraine barred officials of Viktor Yanukovych’s corrupt, Russian-backed government, and after its civil war America banned those who had participated in insurrection. Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s ex-president, was disqualified for contesting the validity of the election that unseated him in 2022. The crimes of which Ms Le Pen has been convicted are serious, but not of the same order. France’s harsh sentence in this case limits the choice of citizens who are capable of judging for themselves who should get their vote. By creating a mechanism that politicians might be thought to have co-opted, the law encourages talk of conspiracy—especially if, like Ms Le Pen, the barred politician belongs to a party that is founded upon a suspicion of the elites.
The second issue is the relationship between politics and the judiciary. The rule of law demands that politicians be treated like other citizens. When it comes to deciding guilt, that is straightforward. But the notion that sentences should take no account of their consequences for politics or governance is misguided. The courts should and do weigh a range of factors, such as their impact on the legitimacy of institutions, including elections. In New York in January, Donald Trump received no punishment for the felonies of which he had been convicted because the American people were deemed to have a right to an unencumbered president. With Ms Le Pen, the French court leant the other way, saying that it had imposed a longer sentence because of the harm she might do in high office.
The danger of courts aggressively sentencing politicians is that both the law and the courts become seen as partisan. Judiciaries rely on citizens accepting verdicts with which they disagree. Elections are supposed to generate consent for the incoming government. A poll after Ms Le Pen’s conviction found just 54% of French thought she was treated like any other accused, a narrow margin of confidence in judicial independence. Among RN voters, 89% thought she was singled out for political reasons.
Supporters of the court’s sentence would note that mistrust of France’s judiciary is mostly the fault of Ms Le Pen and her party. The RN has spent decades spreading conspiratorial allegations that France is ruled by a nebulous self-dealing elite which uses its control of institutions to keep them out of power. Ms Le Pen received messages of support not just from the European hard right (Hungary’s Viktor Orban tweeted “Je suis Marine”), but also from France’s hard left: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the Unsubmissive France party, said the people should decide the fate of elected politicians.
Ms Le Pen should indeed be able to stand in 2027. Her appeal would ordinarily take up to two years to reach trial, but the court of appeal has wisely said that it will be decided by the summer of 2026. The court should shorten her suspension (other defendants got as little as a year), allowing her to re-enter the contest before the election. Eric Ciotti, a French right-wing MP with ties to Ms Le Pen, wants legislation to end immediate pre-appeal suspensions; if it were adopted before the appeal is heard, Ms Le Pen might be able to run. François Bayrou, the prime minister, says he is open to debating the proposal. In any event, Ms Le Pen will not get off easily: she must serve two years wearing an electronic tag (plus a two-year suspended sentence), and pay a heavy fine. That seems right: the aim should be to punish the offender without also punishing French democracy. ■