France is still in shock.
The ruling last week that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally misused millions of euros in European Parliament funds has upended the country’s politics. As Ms. Le Pen was quick to say, her polling position made her the favorite to win the next presidential election in 2027. The verdict, barring her from running for office for five years, has all but ruled that out. In response, her National Rally colleague Jordan Bardella decried an “execution of French democracy,” and the party called for protests against “judicial dictatorship.” Sermonizing to a few thousand party devotees on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen denounced judges for “trampling on the rule of law.”
National Rally’s outrage is more than a little hypocritical. It has long played on other parties’ scandals to insist that it alone had “clean hands,” arguing that elite figures must be judged without fear or favor. In this case, Ms. Le Pen’s downfall was her own doing. It was delivered by judges seeking to better punish political misconduct and justified by recent legal reforms that stipulate mandatory bans for politicians convicted of abuse of office — a proscribing Ms. Le Pen had in fact called for earlier in her career. Now it has boomeranged against her. Really, she can have no complaints.
But this is a bigger story than Ms. Le Pen. Over the past decade, insurgent right-wingers have railed against corrupt political elites, from the Trumpian call to “drain the swamp” to the French far right’s damnation of the “political caste.” But when those forces themselves come under legal scrutiny, it’s like water off a duck’s back. Even the most damning rulings have had no effect on the support for far-right parties and leaders. If anything, they’ve seemed to help. Just look at President Trump, convicted of multiple felonies in the summer and elected to the presidency in the fall.
Embezzlement and polarizing legal decisions aren’t new, of course. But the crisis of Western democracy, most fundamentally, is about voters’ perception that decisions are taken out of their hands. Whatever the merits of each case, courts banning candidates is more likely to speed this sentiment than to slow it. Wrongdoers should be held to account whatever their political popularity. Yet unfavorable court decisions, we should know by now, aren’t going to stop the world’s Trumps.
Sure enough, Ms. Le Pen’s admirers soon spun the ruling as a tale of malicious muzzling. It was, Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social, a “witch hunt” and an example of “lawfare.” But this was not an instance of activist judges arbitrarily abusing their position to strike down the top-rated candidate. Though the sentence is severe, comparable bans have been given to politicians of different stripes in recent years, including for financial crimes far smaller in scale. Yet whatever the facts of the matter, the effect has been to turn Ms. Le Pen into a martyr rather than focus public attention on her party’s criminality.
A similar process is playing out in Romania. After a far-right ultranationalist candidate, Calin Georgescu, topped the first round of the presidential election last fall, the results were annulled over alleged campaign finance violations and TikTok’s promotion of his candidacy. In March, the Constitutional Court barred Mr. Georgescu from running again. Elon Musk, speaking for an enraged global right, had labeled the court’s head “a tyrant, not a judge.” In the end, the ban was a blow to the candidate, not to the cause. Another self-described Trumpist candidate, George Simion, now has a strong poll lead for May’s rescheduled contest.
Germany is wrestling with a similar predicament. Some, including over a hundred lawmakers, argue that a ban on the far-right Alternative for Germany party is necessary to stifle a dangerous force whose members include neo-Nazis. But with the party already winning over 20 percent support and rising in opinion polls, outlawing it seems entirely impractical. What’s more, the party has taken steps to avoid legal censure. It recently dissolved its own youth section to skirt a possible ban, and when its most extremist faction came under investigation in 2020, the party formally dissolved it.
Today, even wealthy democracies with long parliamentary traditions seem vulnerable. This is, in part, because of the rise of parties with fascist undercurrents. But it also reflects the deeper hollowing out of democratic participation and confidence in political action itself. Postwar democracies that faced challenges like the Cold War, decolonization and sometimes large-scale political terrorism were riven with major, often violent conflicts. But they also had the strength of mass-membership parties — cornerstones of a system reliant not just on the rule of law or regular electoral contests but also on economic progress, the sense of a better future and democratic competition over the distribution of growth.
Those forms of mass investment in democracy have long since withered. Our post-Cold War, postmodern era has weakened the contest between grand ideological visions or rival economic projects. It has also produced a more fissiparous public realm, with less shared faith in institutions or even the same truths. In this setting, we see the rise of an antipolitical cynicism feeding the far right. It is an anti-establishment attitude that damns the political system as inherently corrupt — but that can forgive critics of that system for their own transgressions, so long as they promise to ax the things that these voters dislike.
Tellingly, “clean hands” isn’t just a French slogan. When Ms. Le Pen’s father began using it in 1993, he was adopting the name of the massive anticorruption case in Italy that exploded that country’s political establishment at the end of the Cold War. For two years, news bulletins broadcast remarkable scenes, as magistrates like Antonio Di Pietro grilled the country’s leading political personnel for having their hands in the till. By 1994, the main postwar parties of government had disappeared entirely. If Italy’s political system was dilapidated, the trials reduced it to rubble.
The result? Mr. Di Pietro later reckoned that the cases produced a political void that did little to empower ordinary Italians. Ironically, the first winner of the anticorruption crusade was Silvio Berlusconi, the Trumpesque media tycoon who entered politics in 1994 both to defend his business empire and to exploit the collapse of the old parties. His political career would be a long series of legal dramas, his opponents forever hoping that one or another ruling would strike him down. But while the center-left obsessed over prosecutions, its working-class base started switching off — and Mr. Berlusconi’s voters kept turning out for less tax and less immigration.
In a sense, the courts did bring down Mr. Berlusconi: In 2013, he was finally, though only briefly, banned from running for public office. This ruling deposed him from his position as linchpin of the Italian right. The problem was his even more right-wing allies stepped into the leading role, first Matteo Salvini and now Giorgia Meloni. The courts cut down Mr. Berlusconi but not his system of power.
Likewise in France today, the ruling against Ms. Le Pen may have succeeded in derailing her presidential bid. But it’s far less clear that it will damage the party she leads. Instead, it could mark another milestone on its path to power.
David Broder (@broderly) is the author, most recently, of “Mussolini’s Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy.”
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