Banning Le Pen, playing with fire - The French people must decide who leads them, not the courts.

Marine Le Pen

Spiked : An insurgent politician, spoiling to cause an upset and topple the establishment, removed from the ballot paper following corruption charges. No, I’m not talking about Erdogan’s Turkey, or some other faraway autocracy, but nominally democratic France, where a court has just upended the next presidential election.

Marine Le Pen – leader of the right-wing National Rally (RN), preparing for a fourth tilt at the French presidency in 2027 – has been banned from standing for election for five years. She’s been found guilty for her role in siphoning off millions of euros in European Parliament funds and using it to fund RN’s domestic political activities. She’s also been fined €100,000 and sentenced to four years in prison – though she would only serve half of that, under house arrest.

It might not come to that – Le Pen will immediately appeal her sentence, a process that could take years. But the five-year ban on her running for president, or any other form of elected office, will take effect immediately, making another bid for the Élysée in two years’ time incredibly unlikely, if not totally impossible.

On the embezzlement charges themselves, Le Pen may well be bang to rights – even if a little creative accounting has long been par for the course among the Brussels set. The judge said National Rally staff had signed ‘fictional contracts’, establishing that ‘all these people were in reality working for the party and not for the MEP to which they were theoretically attached’. Le Pen refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing throughout, leading to a harsher sentence.

Still, that the judge granted prosecutors’ request for a fittingly titled ‘provisional execution ban’, decapitating her presidential campaign before it even began, has rightly shocked Le Pen’s supporters and even a few of her opponents. She stormed out before her full sentence could be read out. After her trial in November, Gérald Darmanin, the justice minister in Emmanuel Macron’s government and aspiring presidential candidate, insisted ‘Madame Le Pen must be fought at the ballot box, not elsewhere’. The giddy reception the ruling has received from sections of the French left, meanwhile, has been depressing – if depressingly predictable.

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