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French politician Marine Le Pen is the most famous and potentially the most consequential New Right leader in Europe. Having reformed her father’s antisemitic National Front party and rebranded it as Rassemblement National, Le Pen was due to be its presidential candidate in two years’ time—an election that, until recently, she was expected to win.

Such a result would have profound implications for the future of the European Union. Since the EU’s inception, French and German leaders have pursued ever-closer economic and political integration on the continent. Marine Le Pen, on the other hand believes that politics is rooted—and must remain sovereign—in the nation state. During a December 2024 interview with the Spanish daily El País, she hammered this point home: “I am deeply Eurosceptic. I am not against Europe, but I consider the way it currently operates to be anti-democratic, anti-national, and completely contrary to the sovereignty of nations.” 

Le Pen is also committed to cutting immigration, particularly Islamic immigration, and her rhetoric on this topic has occasionally landed her in trouble. In 2015, she was prosecuted for (and then acquitted of) “incitement to discrimination over people’s religious beliefs” after she compared Muslims praying in public to the Nazi occupation of France.  During a debate with President Macron before the last election, she confirmed that she would seek to ban Islamic headscarves in all public spaces.

Le Pen is not out of step with European public opinion on immigration: a May 2023 poll by the British foreign-affairs centre Chatham House found that at least 40 percent of respondents in all European states favour ending Muslim immigration into Europe. In five of these states—Austria, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, and France—over sixty percent of the public supports such a ban. Were she to become president, Le Pen would no doubt cut back hard on Muslim immigration, providing an example for other New Right parties in Europe to follow.

Although Le Pen lost presidential elections in 2012, 2017, and 2022, she increased her vote share with each successive campaign. The 2027 election would almost certainly have been her last chance of victory, but her candidacy is now in jeopardy following a ruling by a Paris criminal court. Le Pen, her party, and 24 co-defendants were charged with using EU funds to pay for party employees who did not work on EU-related business, from November 2004 to January 2016. The court found that Rassemblement National embezzled more than €4 million, of which Le Pen was responsible for €474,000, as an MEP and as president of her party.

The court’s judgement was, the Financial Times reported, “the most severe sentence possible to the three-time presidential candidate: an immediate five-year ban on standing for office, a four-year prison sentence and a €100,000 fine.” She will serve no prison time—she will be required to wear a tag for two years and the remainder of the sentence will be suspended. However, the criminal court has ruled that she may not appeal its judgement. Le Pen lodged an immediate appeal anyway in the hope of getting the court’s decision overturned in whole or in part, but her immediate options are limited. “No way exists to challenge the immediate ban,” her lawyer said on the day of the ruling. “Marine Le Pen, despite the fact she is appealing, cannot go before any institution or court to seek to get the immediacy of the ban suspended.”

A Question of Legitimacy

The Rassemblement National was thwarted by a coalition of convenience, but it remains the party with the largest grip on French voters.

QuilletteJohn Lloyd

The person most likely to benefit from this development is Jordan Bardella, whom Le Pen made president of Rassemblement National. Bardella’s grandparents were Italian immigrants, his mother was a kindergarten assistant, and his father—who left his mother when Bardella was a year old—was a small businessman. He attended a semi-private Catholic school, which he told French daily Le Monde was the “only establishment in Saint-Denis where a teacher was not at risk of having a chair thrown at their head.”

Bardella began a degree in geography at the Sorbonne university, but dropped out to focus on politics. Marine Le Pen was his inspiration and he had already joined the RN youth wing when he was just sixteen years old. He will turn thirty this September—handsome, self-controlled, ambitious, and popular, he would be the natural choice to replace LePen as his party’s presidential candidate. Bardella is, however, much younger and less experienced than previous French presidents, and he can appear fazed by tough questions in interviews.

President Emmanuel Macron was 39 when he became president, and that was thought to be young at the time despite his wealth of experience. He had earned degrees from Sciences Po and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, worked and prospered as an investment banker at the Rothschild group, and been an adviser and finance minister to socialist president François Hollande. Breaking with Hollande, Macron entered the 2017 presidential race after the centre-right favourite François Fillon dropped out amid allegations of corruption. Macron then won the election as the leader of a new liberal centrist party he called En Marche (now renamed Renaissance).

The president and his possible successor could hardly be further apart—and not just because Bardella grew up in a broken family on a Saint Denis public-housing estate while Macron enjoyed a comfortable upper-middle-class upbringing. Macron believes that France’s divisions can be addressed by liberal-conservative policies within the generous carapace of the EU, while Bardella—a man with no illusions about the violence of the poorest city areas—believes that mass migration is oppressing the working and lower-middle classes and has vowed to lift that burden. Were Bardella to win the presidency, France would begin marching to the beat of a very different drum.

Could Le Pen still stand? Notwithstanding the criminal court’s refusal to permit a judicial review of its ruling, a Paris appeal court has announced that it is willing to hear her case. That is likely to happen next summer, and if the ban on her candidacy is struck down, she would be able to run in 2027. In the meantime, her party and its supporters are preparing to portray Le Pen as a democratic martyr persecuted by an authoritarian French establishment. The day after the judgment, the RN issued a petition titled, “Save Democracy, Support Marine!,” which described the court’s decision as “a democratic scandal” and called for “popular and peaceful mobilisation” at a rally on Sunday 6 April in the Place Vauban. “Let us show those who would circumvent democracy,” the petition concluded, “that the will of the people is stronger!”

The party wants its supporters to be angry, but not too angry—a riot would cut into the RN’s polling figures and allow its opponents to link the party to the prospect of chaos were Le Pen or Bardella to win the presidency. The court’s judgment, on the other hand, may turn out to help rather than hinder Le Pen and her party. As a commentary from the European Council on Foreign Relations points out, “The sentencing of far-right politician Marine Le Pen for embezzling EU funds will not only change the 2027 race for the French presidency. It also risks emboldening anti-establishment narratives across Europe and the US”:

This decision will reverberate across French politics and influence the battle of narratives over the state of democracy in the West. It will further legitimise the already widespread claim—promoted by the US administration—that elites have taken over Western political systems and have fundamentally skewed it against the will of ordinary people.

The rally at the Place Vauban will be a test. If it remains peaceful and attracts many thousands of attendees, it will lend support to a growing belief that the law is being unfairly instrumentalised for partisan purposes and that democracy is under threat. At the very top of the French government, Prime Minister François Bayrou has said he is “troubled” by the judgement and particularly the ban on an appeal. Even the Economist—not a publication generally known for its defence of criminals—has called for a sentence that “punishes the offender without also punishing French democracy.” Le Pen, the editors argue, should be made to pay a large fine and wear a tag, but the appeal court should shorten her suspension and permit her to stand in the election. “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.” 

We are presently watching the opening scene of this political drama, in which an apparently fateful decision has been taken. Just how fateful will become clear in the coming months.

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: Book deals for those who hid Biden’s decline.

This information is all well and good – but a simple question should be posed. Where are the apologies to those who used their eyes and ears to observe Joe Biden’s decline and were labeled “cheap-fake artists” and conspiracy theorists for talking about it contemporaneously? Where are the book deals for journalists at the Wall Street Journal who reported on Biden forgetting names and faces behind the scenes? Columnist Karol Markowicz wrote in April 2022 at the New York Post, “Biden’s decline is obvious to everyone but the press.” Where is her book deal and Morning Joe media tour?

Journalists who chose to look the other way in service of making sure Donald Trump did not return to the White House do not deserve to be financially rewarded for revealing all the sordid details of Biden’s decline, if they deceived the American public and participated in a massive scandal and cover-up at the time. They should not be writing books. They should be apologizing to the rest of us.

Live look at leftist journalists at the start their “now it can told” interview segments:

Religious dogmatism sparked it; the religious “intellectual humility” fad puts fuel on the fire.

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