The Fall and Rise of Marine Le Pen

France's Opposition Leader has been Banned from Running for President- for Now

“You will smile here at the consistency of those democratists, who, when they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time, they pretend to make them the depositories of all power.”
- Edmund Burke [Reflections on the Revolution in France]

Marine Le Pen, three time French Presidential candidate, walks out of the court room after a guilty verdict was delivered.

On Monday, March 31st, Marine Le Pen, the long-time leader of National Rally, the largest opposition party in France, was found guilty of embezzlement along with many of her colleagues. This was not, however, the normal kind of embezzlement, with the judges acknowledging in the ruling that the purpose of the scheme was not personal enrichment. Instead, National Rally is said to have used the budget their Members of European Parliament are given for aides to conduct domestic party business, and that many of those aides never met their supposed bosses. Le Pen’s defense did not deny the substance of the charges, instead saying that there isn’t a difference between European Parliament work and party work. It is hard to judge this as an outsider, given that the European Parliament is more or less pointless, but the United States does have fairly strict laws about this sort of thing, particularly as it relates to campaigning [no press coverage has indicated that the aids were used for campaigns, though.] The closest, but non-parallel example, would be if Federal Congressional aides were used to conduct state party business in the United States, the legality of which would presumably depend a great deal on what they were doing, and might be allowed if you claimed they were a liaison between state politicians and the Federal Representatives or that sort of thing. The difference is in the US no one would do this, because the Federal Government is “the big leagues,” whereas, especially for “Eurosceptic” parties like the RN, the European Parliament is not much more than a make-work program for party functionaries.

Le Pen, along with more than 20 colleagues, were given various sentences, with Le Pen getting 2 years of house arrest, a two year suspended sentence, and a 100,000 € fine. The party itself was fined over two million euros, which is still substantially less than the over four million they are said to have wrongfully paid out to employees over the years. More consequentially, she was banned from running for office for 5 years. Of all of this, the immediate suspension from running for office is the most unusual. French politicians being prosecuted has become fairly routine, but usually all penalties are suspended until the appeals process is played out, which could take perhaps five or ten years [the charges cover the years 2004-2016, so she has already ran for President twice with this ongoing in one form or another.] Le Pen’s ban was widely compared to a string of situations where judges have ruled ineligible for office or imprisoned populist candidates, but it does in many ways stand apart. France has strong state institutions, and though I am critical of both the ability of courts to ban candidates and the decision to do so over this case, it does appear this was all done by the book with solid evidence, as opposed to a situation like with Calin Georgescu in Romania where they were clearly just making shit up as they went along.

Still, many, including some of Le Pen’s political rivals, were critical of this judgement for a variety of reasons, most of all the belief that this should be left to the voters. Regardless of all that, it was expected from all corners that with the glacial pace of France’s legal system there was no chance of the appeal going through before the 2027 election, but then a few days later the court made an announcement which surprised everyone: a ruling will be issued the summer of 2026. As all of this was ongoing the famously restive French were surprisingly calm, despite such monumental developments. A National Rally demonstration, as well as an opposition counter-demonstration, on Sunday, April 7 were both fairly small, in the 5-10,000 range [I’m a skeptic of all crowd counting, but suffice to say it wasn’t like the March on Washington.] It is considered that if Le Pen cannot find a way to get back on the ballot her 29 year-old protege Jordan Bardella- a handsome and charming, but somewhat vapid, young man- will be National Rally’s candidate in the next election. Few think Le Pen is down for the count, but no one can know how and in what form the “friendly cat lady” Marine claws herself back from this.¹

Marine Le Pen with the current head of National Rally, Jordan Bardella, last year. I suspect they are lovers, but in France’s unique political culture this would be so uncontroversial that no one speculates about it, whereas if it was discovered one of them regularly attended Mass it could cause a major scandal.

Stepping back for a second before I get to the story in-depth- because people are really not understanding how this played out- I do need to explain my own position. Readers will know that though I usually try to stay out of the partisan politics of other countries, I am both a total Francophile and a long-time Marine Le Pen supporter. To some extent this can be justified in that France is a major first world country, and I am not, for example, way too involved in the domestic politics of some minor and weak state. I’m fully capable of doing my job properly, but it must be said that I absolutely want Marine Le Pen to become President of France and am quite invested in her career, particularly because I strongly believe in the importance of a politically independent France to a balanced global order and also because I love France and want it to remain France.

However, outside of all the sudden uninformed ad hoc reckonings about this from general supporters of right-populism, there are valid criticisms of Le Pen from my fellow political travelers on the right who actually know about French politics. The most of relevant regards her attempt at “mainstreaming” the party. The fact is this: every alternative political party has to make the decision about if they want to rule or if they want to be a club for social outcasts- which is absolutely what National Front² was under Le Pen’s father, the recently deceased Jean-Marie. It isn’t obvious how much a party should compromise in order to rule- I don’t feel that Marine has taken it too far. Some do feel she has taken it too far, but Éric Zemmour, who ran for President in 2022 targeting those voters ultimately got only 7% in the first round, and those voters almost to the man voted for Le Pen in the general. Of course, what is the point of victory of you sell your soul along the way, but on the other hand what is the point of being in politics if you never get anywhere? This is the great paradox of non-mainstream politics.

The only comparable situation in a major European country where the “far-right” has taken power is Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and many feel she has taken it too far and has been a disappointment, but she has been quite effective on some key issues like normalizing deportations. It must be noted that the position of the Italian Prime Minister is a substantially more unstable and consensus-reliant position than the President of France [the only strong Presidency in Western Europe.] This is all the background I intend to give about myself, France, or Le Pen generally, though readers with greater interest can read my last article about France from the time of the snap election, which links to prior articles:

Back to the story, it feels unnecessary to go much further in explaining the scheme and the investigation, but it needs to be emphasized this has been going on for much longer than openly suppressing democracy has been en vogue. France long took a fairly casual stance towards petty corruption, treating a degree of personal enrichment as a sort of job perk as long as it didn’t damage the functioning of the state. For one particularly French example, some decades ago the Socialist Party President François Mitterand kept his mistress and their daughter in a nice government-owned apartment in Paris rent-free and this was widely known in Paris and never prosecuted. It was Marine Le Pen herself who tried to make corruption a bigger political issue. In the early 2000’s as she was preparing to take over National Front she used the slogan “Hands Clean, Head High” and said the following on TV,

“Everyone has stolen money except for the National Front! And they say it’s normal, not serious! They say the French are sick of hearing about it. But the French are not sick of hearing about it. They’re sick of it happening!”

Cécile Alduy, a professor of French Studies at Stanford, said in an interview,

“There are amazing archives of several interviews she did at the time where she was aggressively condemning her adversaries for being corrupt and asking that any politician found guilty of embezzlement be barred from office for life. She’s the one who asked for it.”

Le Pen indeed supported this exact law allowing corruption convictions to lead to immediate disqualification. David Bell, writing at UnHerd, notes that the French idiom “l’arroseur arrosé,” hoist by your own petard, quite well describes what has happened here. However, it comes back to what counts as corruption. For example, Jacques Chirac was given a two year suspended sentence after his Presidency for phantom jobs, the type of corruption Le Pen was describing. Meanwhile, another former President, Nicolas Sarkozy, just had prosecutors recommend a seven year sentence, but that is an extreme case as he is said to have taken millions of Euros from Libya’s Gaddafi for his Presidential campaign, and he then led efforts towards the violent overthrow of Gaddafi, presumably to help cover that up, which had disastrous effects for a vast region of the world. The former Prime Minister François Fillon from the “mainstream” conservative Republican Party³ was also charged with giving his wife a fake job in 2017 it’s one of the things which tanked his Presidential bid, where he came in 3rd behind Le Pen and didn’t move to the second round. Fillon was convicted in 2020 and banned from running for office; the appeals went on for years but his political career was already over, though notably, as is more standard, the ban’s implementation was delayed pending appeal.

The key difference here is that Le Pen and National Rally are not even accused of having done any of this for personal enrichment. In RN’s case the situation is that fairly strict donation limits to French political parties, which have not been adjusted for inflation for decades, constantly starve political parties of money so they couldn’t afford key staff. This “corruption” was to promote National Rally’s political agenda, which is in fact the point of having Parliamentary aids. However, it is the sort of the things that Mandarins genuinely care about but that some voters do not. Evidence presented demonstrates that at least some people within National Rally knew this would not be allowed. In one particularly revealing exchange reported by The Guardian, a Parliamentarian who had previously worked as a lawyer texted the following to the party treasurer, “What Marine is asking is equivalent to us signing for fictitious jobs …” He warned this was likely to be spotted. “I think Marine knows all that …” the treasurer replied.” In another instance, a supposed Parliamentary aide had never been there at all months into employment, writing in an email, “I’d like to see the European Parliament and that would also allow me to meet the member of the European Parliament I’m attached to.” Other notable cases were the long-time bodyguard of Jean-Marie Le Pen and later Marine being classified as a Parliamentary aid [and not hers, it would seem] and Marine’s sister Yann, the mother of the beautiful political star Marion Maréchal, was also convicted for working in event planning at the party headquarters in Paris while being listed as a European Parliament aid.

I’m gratuitously including this picture of Marine with her niece Marion Maréchal because the latter is really sexy. In the last election she went against her aunt and supported Zemmour, the farther right candidate, but has now been one of Marine’s biggest defenders.

It’s not unreasonable to say that they are all on the same team and working towards the same political objectives, so in the biggest picture the aids are working towards the goals of the Parliamentarians, but this quite clearly is not what the funding is for. The defense’s argument the whole trial was that this distinction is artificial, which is more or less true of all government workplace regulations but you can’t just borrow a secretary for 6 months and have her in the wrong office on someone else’s payroll without reporting it [I don’t particularly care, but everyone knows it isn’t allowed.] You could say that the bodyguard was a liaison between the party members and the leader and that others were crafting joint policy papers in Paris and kind of pooling resources for efficiency, but they stretched it past plausibility.

On the other hand, it seems as if the rules weren’t particularly clear, with Associated Press reporting, “Only two rules seem to apply: Family members cannot be hired, and assistants should focus on EU business and not work against the legislature’s interest. But the assembly has no clear system for enforcing the rules.” What is EU business? Guarding the party leader is a kind of EU business, as is hosting party events as long there is discussion of various EU matters. The distinction between national and EU parties is somewhat fictitious even by government regulation standards. I find this line “can’t work against the legislature’s interest” particularly funny. National Rally has somewhat softened on this but plenty of people in the EU Parliament want to either leave the EU or have it dissolved entirely, which is obviously against the legislature’s interest. Also the last part there explains how it is France came to be prosecuting this despite that it doesn’t seem like they broke French laws in doing this: Brussels itself has no enforcement mechanism.

One of the main arguments of those who say this is unfair is that regarding using the legislative aides for party business, “everyone is doing it.” That is true, actually. The problem however is that everyone is being prosecuted for it. The “hard left” leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon was raided over this exact thing in 2018, though he is also far out of the mainstream and someone who one could imagine being unfairly targeted, as the centrists will do as much or more to keep him out of power as they would with Le Pen. Mélenchon’s case is still ongoing, because as we’ve learned, this shit takes forever in France, but he has said the decision about Le Pen should be left to the people, breaking with most of the rest of France’s left wing who were glad to see an opponent removed under the auspices of the “rule of law.” In another case, France’s current Prime Minister François Bayrou and his Democratic Movement party were also tried for this and the party and 8 members were convicted, but Bayrou himself was acquitted, due to a lack of direct involvement; prosecutors are appealing the acquittal. There may be other investigations in progress, but these are just the ones I came across. I imagine in the EU as a whole this is absolutely rampant, especially in former Warsaw countries. One way or another, while it is clear that there isn’t the level of separation between the EU Parliament and the national parties that there is between something like the office staff and the campaign staff in American politics [which is very strictly regulated] what National Rally was doing is generally prohibited and at least currently the regulation is being enforced.

In the case of this trial, prosecutors argued, and judges accepted, that the gravity of the crimes and the lack of contrition meant the defendants were highly likely to misuse public funds again if they were to return to public office [many besides Le Pen are no longer MEPs, the period in question having ended 9 years ago.] Le Pen’s reaction to the verdict does seem to back up the judges point about a lack of contrition. Associated Press described Le Pen receiving the verdict as follows,

“From the front row of the court, Le Pen had initially shown no immediate reaction when the judge first declared her guilty. But she grew more agitated as the verdict was then delivered in greater detail. She nodded her head in disagreement as the judge said Le Pen’s party had illegally used European Parliament money for its own benefit.

“Incredible,” Le Pen whispered at one point. She then abruptly left without warning, picking up her bag and striding out, her heels click-click-clicking on the hardwood floor, leaving disbelief in her wake.”

Le Pen said afterwards that they were only interested in preventing her from running. The next day, Le Pen told a Parliamentary group, “The system has brought out the nuclear bomb because we’re on the verge of winning.”

Marine surrounded by media after her conviction.

All of the above demonstrates that at least to some extent the French legal system was acting within its appropriate purview, and that to at least some extent she was less stitched up then she would have you believe. However, the immediate ban on running for office is unusual. A ban from office is mandatory for being convicted of misappropriating public funds, but it being immediate is wholly at the judges discretion and more usually it would come at the end of the many years’ long appeals process, which is to say she might be President before the case was resolved. The surprise decision to let the appeal happen before the next election does show some indication of wanting to ensure she is treated fairly, or at least create the appearance of such, but even so it looks awful to do this to a leading candidate over something her voters consider fairly trivial. There is a quote from Machiavelli that the Mandarins perhaps should have thought of before outright removing a candidates eligibility, even if she was found guilty of this crime,

“Men must…consider the defects and dangers of every decision and avoid adopting one that is more dangerous than useful, notwithstanding the fact that they might find it to be in accord with their own thinking.”
[Discourses, I.53.]

To their class, democracy is not at all “rule by the people,” it is a form of technocratic government where elections and government turnover are rituals and not the transfer of the most important powers. It shouldn’t be downplayed the extent to which banning her from office over this is the form of government they believe in, as opposed to compromising their beliefs to target her. Even so, many of them worried about what impact this might have. Reactions were of course immediate to this major news, but there was an interesting feature to the collection of commentary: the people with a full-retard worldview were fairly well-informed as to the facts of this particular case, whereas the people who understand the elites are trying to subvert democracy across the world didn’t bother to properly look into it before popping off about the situation- elitism vs. populism personified, I suppose.

On the side of those in favor of the decision, David Bell at Unherd, despite ceaselessly relating the situation to America, did thorough job of explaining that the law is never truly neutral because it always relies on the discretion of prosecutors and judges [and in his defense, at the anti-RN rally in Paris, some protesters had signs saying “no Trumpism in France.”] He writes,

“France does not need more instability. Unfortunately, though, it’s not always possible to reconcile the need for political peace with the needs of justice. While prosecutors should always take the possible political consequences of their actions into account, and examine their own political motivations for filing charges, they can’t ignore glaring cases of criminality.”

I do in principle agree with this assessment about such situations, though he mostly goes on about Trump, I am reminded of in 2016 when the FBI more or less directly said that Hillary Clinton appeared to have committed prosecutable offenses but they wouldn’t do so because she was a candidate, which was in all ways hamfisted.

A much less wise statement came from the former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who said efforts should be made to avoid politicizing the decision, and then said, “It’s not up to us, or to anyone else, to say whether the court’s judgement was good or bad. It is our responsibility to always stick to the facts.” This is an incredible example of what I hate so much about these people. Not “politicizing” the decision to ban a candidate from running is goofy enough in and of itself, but the slavish devotion to the magistrates completely cedes his role as both a citizen and a legislator. It is absolutely for him to say whether or not it is a good decision, particularly as the immediate ban on running for office was entirely at the judges discretion. Further, that doesn’t even make sense, if he feels the courts decision stuck to the facts, he is implying that he feels it was fair and that he supports it. He should also in theory have some sort of opinion on if allowing judges to ban people from running for office is good policy, and if the facts described constitute breaking the laws in question. This is what free government and politics is, and I guess I don’t know the ins and outs of how magistrates are chosen in France but the former Prime Minister should have a stance on judicial behavior that goes beyond “obey the system.” In his defense, however, France is a civil code country, not a common law country, and the right to a neutral judge and trial by a jury of your peers does not exist, so to some extent I am imposing my own Anglo values on the situation, but nevertheless the former Prime Minister is absolutely in a position to have an opinion. This still quite-young-for-politics man who presumably intends to run for President in the future is telling citizens its not for them to have an opinion about the French justice system.

Perhaps preparing to be Attal’s future greatest supporters, Le Monde, France’s most important newspaper, was substantially less reasonable than UnHerd, publishing an article titled, “Acceleration of Le Pen’s appeal undermines the principle of equality before the law.” The article says the decision to allow the appeal “seeks to prove, to an absurd degree, that the judiciary does not meddle in politics.” He laments the fact that they “tailor-made” this decision to “benefit” Le Pen. It would seem to me that he seeks to prove to an absurd degree that democracy is the least important part of “democracy” and that an appeal should not be held in a timely fashion for something as trivial as the public feeling that elections are fair and credible. It is certainly assholes like the author Franck Johannès who make the public go for populism over elitism. Crucially, the election ban was pretty clearly primarily put in place considering the particular circumstances, and as such the appeal process should consider the same thing, or at least that’s how it would seem to someone who doesn’t write for Le Monde.

Writing at The Conversation, which is basically a website for academics to communicate with the public, a politics lecturer in the United Kingdom named Aurelian Mondon gave reasonable advice about not letting a victimhood narrative take hold. He suggests they actually engage with National Rally’s model for society, which in his view is just supplanting the current elite with a different, more authoritarian elite. He proposes opposing them on the level of their politics instead of using their presence to distract from the elites’ many failures. That is all fairly sagacious, though the odds of anyone doing this are minimal. He also makes a dubious claim that immigration is not that significant of an issue in French politics based on the data that people rate it as a higher issue for France than for themselves personally [which is to say they feel that it impacts the nation more than their own lives] and he seems to think that means it isn’t important, because of course this class thinks everyone but over-educated liberals vote based on self-interest instead of a conception of the national good [the great irony being that their conception of the national good is a tyranny of over-educated liberals.]

The Guardian lived up to its reputation as the home of the world’s most ridiculous op-eds, with one Alexander Hurst telling us this conviction can make France the “anti-Trump” but also making sure we understand this is all really about PUTIN. He writes,

“During the time that the embezzlement was under way, the FN/RN was heavily indebted to a Kremlin-connected Russian bank. Paying off the debt helped the party claim it no longer maintained inappropriate links to Vladimir Putin’s power circle – would it have been able to do so without the misused funds? And would it have been as competitive in the elections it contested without the unfair advantage of fraudulent finances?”

Bear in mind here that because of the cordon sanitaire French banks wouldn’t do business with RN, which is why they had the Russian loan. That was at the very beginning of anti-Russia mania, and if anything that has somewhat tied Le Pen’s hands on foreign policy, where she is a key part of the pro-sanity faction in Europe. Further, the Hursts of the world talked about that loan constantly, so it wouldn’t have been anymore of a political issue than it was even if they still held it and were trying to pay it off. Hurst also tells us,

“The RN makes no secret about which company it keeps and attracts. The French court’s verdict was decried by such paragons of the rule of law as the Kremlin (“a violation of democratic norms”), Elon Musk (of course), who denounced an “abuse” of the judicial system, and Viktor Orbán, who posted: “Je suis Marine!” Exactly. Orbán is Marine; Putin is Marine; Trump is Marine.”

Great work he’s done here, he covered some of my talking about people supporting her, but this is all absurd. Musk certainly doesn’t know what he’s talking about, while the Kremlin is trolling. On the other hand, their hatred of Orban is idiotic and he is basically just a European leader who believes in “boss government” instead of “HR department government.” Regardless, Hurst got this out before Trump said “FREE MARINE LE PEN!” which really doesn’t make sense given that she is still at liberty. I don’t agree with Gabriel Attal above who in that same speech called people expressing these opinions, “unprecedented interference” but I do see how the French would be annoyed by all of these uninformed opinions [it would seem that calling allegedly buying some random Facebook ads during the US election in 2016 “Russian interference” really lowered the bar for what is considered “interference.”]

The online commentariat also got into saying all the same things, because of course they “are the media now” which means they never have to fact check or apologize:

I don’t mean to pick on Greenwald, who in many ways I admire- though he has been linestepping on hack territory for some time now- but it really isn’t an informed opinion to compare what Le Pen is going through to all of these other people. I can’t speak to all of those cases, but the elected prosecutors trying to make a career going after Trump were shameless and there was an open campaign to disqualify him from office through what can be fairly called lawfare. The charges against both Georgescu and Khan are even more transparently bullshit. What’s crucial here is that in France Le Pen’s opponents have faced these same charges and this was a long-running investigation with a trial that took place two full years before a Presidential election. The French legal system did this properly and about as far away from an election as it could. Further, and this must be emphasized, that following asinine rules is more important than the public will is the core of these peoples’ political ideology.

A political scientist at Oxford University, Ben Ansell, succinctly explains a phenomenon taking place here that many have noticed in a statement for CNN,

“Although this debate is deeply entrenched and goes back centuries, the two camps have recently switched sides. Conservatives typically treasure civic institutions as a storehouse of ancestral wisdom; those on the left have championed universal rights, individual freedoms and the vox populi.

But in recent years, those philosophical starting points have flipped. Left wing-progressives, once skeptical of the status quo, have become stolid guardians of institutions, while right-wing conservatives – once champions of prudence – are tearing down fences.”

It is certainly true that for better or for worse the right wing are the democrats now. What happened is that a left-leaning class of incompetent elitist Mandarins took over those institutions and began to use them to harm us while doing little to conceal their hatred of the working man and the commonplace. Historically, institutions have been conservative, and as much as anything, that is what has changed: they have been trying to transform society for a couple of generations and have done a terrible job. They only got so far along due to the hesitation of conservatives to oppose such institutions which was because of the conservative’s temperamental deference to institutional authority.

Another political scientist interview by CNN, Yascha Mounk at Johns Hopkins, said,

“If we empower courts to cancel the outcome of elections because we’re shocked by who the winner is, we’re very close to living in a system of government whose ultimate arbiters are judges rather than people.”

We’re already there, particularly after Romania and everything else that has happened. Many people who five years ago would have deferred to the courts on this matter are no longer willing to. The jig is up and courts can’t be trusted to have this power over the national political process, which is in some ways a bad thing.

As to my view on this matter, I don’t so much mind the house arrest and suspended sentence, presumably Marine could spend it in the mansion which was long the unofficial National Front headquarters,⁴ and anyway that would be years out with their system if they didn’t move it up specifically because of the electoral ban. Further, generally people on house arrest get to leave for work so for her basically all the time, the ankle bracelet would be more like a sign of shame, or perhaps pride, than a serious impediment. My bigger issue is that allowing the judiciary to block people from running for executive is a bad law, because it is the public’s final check on judicial abuse, and one which the United States, for better or for worse, just used. At the same time, Marine herself supported this being allowed before the appeals process was through. It should be mentioned that though it is bad policy, France does have a historical reason for allowing the judiciary to prohibit candidates, being as France’s first elected President, Napoleon III, had previously been imprisoned, and ultimately launched a coup and overthrew the Republic instead of leaving office; France did not risk a system of popularly elected Presidents for over 100 years after that.⁵

The reality is that the charges against Le Pen are not the usual kind of corruption, and whether or not it should ban her from office cannot reasonably be decided by the judiciary. The polling has been kind of all over the place because polls don’t easily pick up on complex issues like this. Plenty of people may think that in theory a politician should be able to be barred for corruption, but is this corruption? Was it not for her perception of the common good? Further, in the immortal words of Victoria Nuland, “fuck the EU.” Plenty of voters- certainly of National Rally voters- feel that the European Union has cost France a lot of money while making France much worse. Is this not the money France gives the EU finally going to something that could actually help them? Did it not support the party’s goals both in France and in Europe? Speaking for myself, I would take a highly negative view of her taking money for personal enrichment, but this I just find kind of irresponsible for no reason besides the likelihood of getting caught and the bad judgment that she herself supported the laws which are now prohibiting her from running for office. Crucially, democracy is in fact a system whereby the public are sovereign and make the most important decisions, it is not just “the rule of law.” It is indeed for the public to decide this within a free state where the head of state is democratically elected.

Marine Le Pen holding an octopus while campaigning. I believe this is from 2017, it was in my personal collection. This is one of my favorite campaign pictures of all time. She is an absolute natural. Political masterminds everywhere dream of a politician who could stand on a boat with sailors and look at their octopus like this.

So where does this all leave Marine Le Pen? Down, but not out, and with several paths to a great comeback. Though the public has not been nearly as energized by this as one would hope, there is a rising tide against judicial tyranny that she stands to benefit from even if she isn’t that much of a victim. It is possible she wins her appeal next summer or that the conviction holds but they decide against the electoral ban in one way or another. She has a large bloc in Parliament and the support of the most important hard left politician in France, if not his faction, so she could use the legislature to her advantage in a variety of ways; since everyone was doing this legislating an amnesty up to the point where it became clear it wasn’t allowed could be one option, though of course Transparency International would take a dim view of such a law. There is also the off-chance that after everything concludes in 2026 Macron pardons her as some sort of a gesture of unity, though that is unlikely. Many, including Marine, are recognizing that Bardella may run earlier than expected; France has no age requirement for being President besides being old enough to vote, but Macron’s election at 39 was unprecedented and Bardella being almost 10 years younger would be crazy. Marion would be more appropriately aged, almost 40 by 2027, but the odds of Marine trusting her after her betrayal in the prior election seem minimal; it being her actual niece also creates an appearance that would be a lot for France and the world to accept. The speculation is that if Marine is banned from running but Bardella or someone else from RN is able to win she would be made Prime Minister, which people want to compare to Medvedev and Putin, though the exact parallel would be the last election in Senegal, where the described scenario is precisely what happened.

Marine Le Pen made mistakes and it is reasonable to question her judgement, but she is a profoundly talented politician- smart, doggedly determined, naturally charismatic, and with a once-in-a-generation ability to work a crowd. This cat lady is a lioness who will be ready to pounce when the time comes. She has already brought National Rally much farther than anyone thought it could go, and this conviction is unlikely to stop her: she remains a vanguard of a rising tide in Europe that can’t be stopped. The Mandarins will likely regret that they wasted their credibility on the fringes of the empire and that people no longer believe what they have to say.

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1. To the great annoyance of people who think she is “literally Hitler,” Marine has successfully cultivated an image among France’s younger generation as your cool, kind of sexy, cat-loving aunt.

2. Marine changed the name of the party from National Front to National Rally as part of her “de-demonization” campaign.

3. They have abysmal numbers these days, getting under 5% in the 2022 election and currently holding around 8% of seats in Parliament, so they are currently “mainstream” in the same sense that CNN is mainstream.

4. When Marine Le Pen was a child her family’s apartment was firebombed in an act of political terrorism. The next year, with a view to their safety, her father was willed a mansion by a wealthy supporter, and it was an unofficial National Front headquarters for decades. She lived there into her 40s and raised her three children there until she moved out around 10 years ago after her dad’s dogs killed one of her cats, the last straw in a long-strained relationship. I don’t actually know who inherited the mansion, but it seems her sister may also be on house arrest with her when the time comes.

5. I’m ambivalent about the libs learning about this, as it is exactly what they fear Trump will do, and they would never shut up about it. On the other hand, I would love more diverse and better historical analogies than Hitler, and Trump is actually somewhat like Napoleon III.