Le Pen back in the dock: the trial that’s shaking France

A trial of “immense significance” for the future of France began this week, said Florian Harms on T-Online (Berlin). Marine Le Pen, 57-year-old head of the far-right National Rally (RN) party, was convicted last year of embezzling millions of euros of EU funds, handed a four-year prison sentence and banned from running for office for the next five years.

But now she is appealing that conviction. And if she wins on appeal and goes on to win next year’s presidential election, as polls suggest she well might, the fundamental values of the Fifth Republic will be imperilled.

Her programme is one of national isolation, of withdrawing France from the structures of the European Union; she and her party have scant regard for democratic checks and balances. The judges in the Paris appeal court hold France’s destiny in their hands.

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Change of strategy

Mind you, Le Pen is taking a big risk in appealing her conviction, said Jedrzej Bielecki in Rzeczpospolita (Warsaw). Yes, some feel the four-year prison sentence she received last March was unduly harsh. Yet as it stands, she won’t spend any time behind bars. Two of those years were suspended; the other two she is to serve with an electronic tag at home. Should she lose her appeal, however, the judges could well decide to up that to ten years in jail. The crime for which she was convicted is no small one, after all: she was judged to have been “at the heart” of a decade-long system of embezzlement, in which taxpayers’ money allocated to MEPs by Brussels to defray the cost of staff assistance in the European Parliament was instead syphoned off to pay for her party workers in France.

Le Pen has previously insisted no crime was committed and that she has been the victim of a judicial “witch-hunt”, said Anthony Berthelier on HuffPost (Paris). And it was the judges’ fear that if she couldn’t see that she had committed a crime she might very well do the same again, which is what persuaded them to ban her from running for office for five years.

So this time round Le Pen has changed her tune: her defence strategy is now to admit a crime was indeed committed but that she was unaware of it, and that it was the European Parliament’s fault for not alerting her to it. But this new strategy could easily backfire: blaming the victim for the crime, which is what this looks like, may not go down well with the court.

‘Badly dented’ image

Actually, it may be no bad thing for her RN party if she does fail in her appeal, said Anaïs Gerbaud in L’Echo Republicain (Chartres). It’s true that, ever since she took over the reins of the party in 2011 from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, and sought to “civilise” it, its vote share in presidential elections has soared, rising to 41.45% in 2022.

“She has never been so close to success,” said Bielecki. But now there are signs that the corruption scandal “has badly dented her image”. Only 36% of respondents in a recent survey in Le Monde felt that “she has been treated more harshly by the courts than the average French person”. More to the point, the party has a far better alternative to her waiting in the wings: its charismatic 30-year-old party president, Jordan Bardella. He is free of the antisemitic and racist taint still associated with the name “Le Pen”, and he now seems to be more popular with voters than his mentor. In the Le Monde poll, 49% of respondents saw Bardella as the candidate who “has the best chance of winning the presidential election”, compared with just 18% for Le Pen.

Whoever its candidate is, RN’s victory is no foregone conclusion, said Le Monde (Paris). The party may command a strong lead in the polls, but Le Pen’s and Bardella’s ideological ties to Donald Trump and “past closeness with Putin” could prove damaging. All is not lost: there’s still time for RN’s opponents to up their game and dispel the “illusory promises of the far-right”.