Debate: Marine Le Pen Should Be Mighty Pleased With Liberal Opinion Watching Her Back

One early June morning in 2017, a friend and I were in a queue waiting to enter St Petersburg’s Hermitage museum. Two Frenchmen and a Frenchwoman, all in their late twenties or thereabouts, were in the queue, too, and we got talking.

Knowing that we were Indians, one of them teased me: "So, are you visiting with your prime minister?” Modi had indeed been in St Petersburg earlier that week.

“But he is not my prime minister – though it’s true he won the election last time,” I said.

“You don’t seem to be particularly proud of your PM,” the woman interjected.

“No, I am not. Would you be proud to tell us Marine Le Pen was your favourite president, supposing she had won last month?” I was referring to Le Pen’s failed bid to be the president at France’s May 2017 presidential elections.

“Goodness gracious, no! Of course not,” she was scandalised. Both her companions endorsed her noisily. 

I recount that incident here to spotlight how unbelievably polarising Marine Le Pen’s persona and politics were even back then. 2017, it is true, now seems many light years behind 2025, now when Trump 2.0 portends the apocalypse. But even in distant 2017 Europe was crawling with far-right bullies – in Austria, in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands… in Hungary and the UK. But I suspect it would be hard for anyone from that venerable crowd of hard-right leaders to inspire the kind of horror that spoke through those three young French citizens that day. And mind you: they were speaking with a perfect stranger – and doing so on the soil of a third country. All this, when Marine Le Pen didn’t have her hands on the levers of power as yet. 

Right

I have seen a little of the other end of the spectrum as well. I happened to be in Paris during the week leading up to the June/July 2024 National Assembly elections. On two occasions I passed by street-corner meetings addressed by Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) operatives, and I must say I felt not a little uneasy as I did so. There were as many streamers calling attention to “des immigres” as posters featuring Marine Le Pen. This, when she was not even on the ballot. It was not easy to tell what animated the assembly more – open hostility to immigrants, or ardent bhakti for Le Pen, and I caught myself looking over my shoulder a few times. Couldn’t some fanatical RN footsoldier take me for an aspiring immigrant, after all?

Given the very divisive issues that Marine Le Pen’s politics is anchored in, it was to be expected that her conviction in a French court on charges of corruption would excite high passions on both sides of the political aisle.

Also read: The Past, Present and Future of France’s Self-Inflicted Far-Right Surge

There’s outrage on the far right, sections of which are screaming that the French justice system has turned into a ‘hit squad’; that democracy has been ‘violated’, ‘executed’ and is ‘dead’. Le Pen herself, never burdened with anything remotely like exactitude or scrupulousness, has let herself go full-throttle: “The system has released a nuclear bomb, and if it is using such a powerful weapon against us, it is obviously because we are about to win the elections”. She is referring to the 2027 French presidential elections, of course, in which polls project her as the favourite, but from which she will be barred now. (Among other penalties, the court has handed her a five-year ban from running for office.)

All this was boringly predictable. What wasn’t, however, is how segments of liberal opinion have reacted to the court’s judgement. Headlined ‘Ill-suited sentence’, an article in The Economist’s ‘Leaders’ section argues that Marine Le Pen should by all means be allowed to run for president in 2027. The author doesn’t suggest that her conviction is improper or flawed, but asserts that in banning her from the 2027 presidential race, the sentence “risks undermining the perceived legitimacy of the next election, by depriving many voters of their preferred candidate”.

“That”, the article goes on to add, “is bad for France”.

“The crimes of which Ms Le Pen has been convicted are serious, but…(are not sufficient) grounds for stopping French voters from judging for themselves who should get their vote”.

To buttress this line of reasoning, the author cites a parallel. “In New York in January (2025). Doinald 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”. Emphasis added.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, left, reacts with Jordan Bardella during the French far-right party national rally near the parliament in Paris, Sunday, April 6, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI.

And what were the grounds for Le Pen’s conviction?

That, between 2004 and 2016 when she was a member of the European parliament, she diverted, on The Economist's own evidence, “EU funds to pay her party’s political staff, falsely claiming that they were working as assistants to its (i.e., RN’s) deputies to the European parliament”. The evidence that the court examined proved beyond doubt that there was a massive and coordinated project to defraud the European Parliament and its associated taxpayers of millions of Euros. Also that there were scores of incriminating emails which showed that RN’s officials knew exactly what they were doing. Crucially, that they also knew they were breaking the law.

And yet, The Economist article concludes, the sentence was out of proportion – not necessarily to the underlying crime, but to what a majority, or, in any case, a large segment of the French electorate may have liked to see as punishment handed down to Marine Le Pen.

For me, such an assessment is breathtaking in its obtuseness. The crime is proved, the sentence doesn’t contravene set procedure, another felon convicted of the same crime wouldn’t have been within their rights to complain about the quantum of the sentence: and yet the judge would have been better advised not to impose this sentence on Le Pen because it deprives many voters of their first choice candidate. By the same token, a judge in Hitler's Germany would be doing their duty if they ruled that gassing of Jews was bad in law, but would be going beyond their remit if they were to censure Hitler – because the Fuehrer, admittedly, remained wildly popular with Germans as long as he breathed. Such logic, surely, is a slippery slope.

And I imagine that the author knows this. Hence the spin that the article gives to a public perception poll on the sentence. The poll found, the author notes, that 54% believed that Le Pen had been ‘treated like any other accused’, in other words, fairly. So isn’t this proof that citizens are broadly on the same page as the judge? Hardly, the author tells us, because 54% is “a narrow margin of confidence in judicial independence”. If this is not sophistry, I don’t know what is. 

Left

Writing for The Wire, Krishnan Srinivasan also seems to think that the sentence slapped on Le Pen is somewhat excessive. “The sum (i.e.,the amount of cash embezzled)”, he says, “is trivial compared to the vast amounts looted by India’s kleptocrats. Besides, some of it was refunded by the RN, and the judge agreed that Le Pen had personally not appropriated any EU money”. The emphasis is mine.

 Srinivasan injects quite a few new elements into the discourse here that The Economist had passed over.

One, that only a few measly million euros were involved here, and the court could well have held its hand and sat back over the theft.

Two, Le Pen’s party had returned a part of the loot – after it had been caught in the act, of course. And, finally, it was not after all a case of personal aggrandizement, for it was RN, and not Marine Le Pen, who had filched the cash.   

As extraordinary an argument against the court’s order as it is, Srinivasan's defence (what other name can you possibly give to this article?) of Le Pen hasn’t run its course yet. “Typically in France, sentences for non-serious crimes or those committed by first-time offenders,” his tagline itself announces, “are not applied until the appeals process has taken place, but in Le Pen’s case” the sentence begins immediately. Lamentably, the author suggests. “The judges could have adapted, modified or rejected the prosecutors’ request (to start the sentence straightaway)”, he adds, “but they chose not to”.

Quite a pity, that, right?

Wrong. Because what the author doesn’t tell us is this: had Le Pen and her party “acknowledged their mistakes and cooperated in facilitating a swift trial, the judges might have taken...(that) into consideration while considering the punishment,” as the BBC reports the judges as having made clear. But rather than doing that, Le Pen stubbornly stalled the court proceedings over and over again, dragging the trial out for almost a decade. “Neither during the investigation nor at the trial did (Le Pen) show any awareness of the need for probity as an elected official, nor of the ensuing responsibilities,” wrote the judges to explain why they had delivered such a tough sentence. With all that in the backdrop, to still act gobsmacked when the sentence hit her – isn’t that a little rich? 

It is, particularly when one thinks of Marine Le Pen’s stated position on corruption in public life. (And, true to style, she made quite a song and dance about that position when she found it handy.) “When are we going to learn the lessons,” she asked eloquently in 2013, “and effectively introduce lifelong ineligibility for those who have been convicted of acts committed while in office or during their term of office?” (Emphasis added). 

She wouldn’t have imagined her own words would come back and bite her some day – which demagogue does? – but there they are.  And no well-wishing commentator’s labours can erase them from public memory. 

Besides, let us not presume to speak on behalf of French citizens, or the French electorate, either. The BBC’s account of an opinion poll taken within a few hours of the court’s ruling gives the lie to reports of massive public outrage on the sentencing. Only 31% – or less than one-third – of those polled felt that the decision to block Le Pen immediately from public office was unjust. In other words, seven out of 10 French citizens do not believe that she got a raw deal. Place that side by side with the results of another recent poll in which voters were asked to indicate their first choice as French president. Le Pen polled 37% in that vote. Which means that not even everyone who favours her as president felt that she was being treated unfairly by the judges. 

One cannot be sure why the liberal commentariat is loving at this point to see  Marine Le Pen as a victim of the system. But a man called Donald Trump lords it over our times, and we must teach ourselves not to be taken by surprise by anything.

And, by the way, hasn’t Trump thrown his own very considerable weight behind Marine Le Pen?

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.