Marine Le Pen Banned From Running

A French court has now banned Marine Le Pen, who is highly likely to win the next election in France, from seeking public office for five years. The court convicted her of misusing European Union funds.

“The court ruled that Le Pen and other members of her party illegally used 4.4 million euros, equivalent to $4.8 million, in EU funding that was earmarked for assistants helping lawmakers in the European Parliament with their work,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “Monday’s sentence bars Le Pen from seeking public office for the next five years, thrusting her far-right party into limbo. Le Pen also received a four-year prison sentence. Half of that term was suspended, judges said, adding that she could serve the remaining two years by using an electronic bracelet or other alternatives to jail time. The ruling takes Le Pen out of contention for the 2027 race, unless she can win a swift appeal. Le Pen had been expected to enter that contest as a front-runner as President Emmanuel Macron will be term limited and other prominent contenders have yet to emerge.”

This is crazy — but this is part and parcel of the broader attempt by Left-wing judiciary activists across the globe to stop “populist politicians” from being able to run.

We saw it with President Trump, where the DOJ went after him for supposed crimes, the same crimes for which they let Joe Biden off the hook. We saw it in New York, where a New York attorney general filed a civil fraud lawsuit in an attempt to stop then-candidate Trump.

We have seen it in Brazil, where the entire judicial apparatus has been brought down on the head of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, in favor of Lula da Silva, who was then freed by that same exact judiciary.

We’ve seen it in Romania, where Cǎlin Georgescu won the election in 2024 and then the judiciary decided the election had been rigged by the Russians and annulled it. 

We have seen it in Israel, where the attorney general of Israel has been targeting Benjamin Netanyahu on specious charges for literally years, and the judiciary keep saying that Netanyahu can’t perform the basic functions of an executive, such as fire his attorney general or fire anyone in the executive branch.

And now we are seeing it in France.

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It is absolutely amazing to watch these unelected officials going out of their way to thwart the will of the people in supposed democracies. It’s really insane.

You want to talk about undermining democracy itself? This undermines democracy because the reaction to this is, “Okay, what if we just overthrow the judicial institutions?”

Why do I feel like this is a put-up job? Because it takes effect immediately. The point is to get her out of the elections. Thus they’re suspending her jail sentence but they are not suspending her ban from running.

Le Pen had denied the charges, “testifying in court that it was appropriate for the assistants to perform other party-related work because they were political aides, not direct employees of the European Parliament,” the Journal noted.

In other words, if the European Parliament didn’t want them focused solely on party-related tasks, perhaps it should have hired them directly, rather than paying the party to handle some of its work. That sounds like a strong defense.

Is the idea here that Marine Le Pen desperately needed a couple of million euros in order to pay off her political party? I feel like she probably could have raised it. Her party’s pretty big in France.

This is just the latest NATO member to reject a populist candidate by some sort of judicial intervention.

If you want to talk about undermining the argument that democracy must flourish in Europe, this would be a great way to do it.