The far-right French politician Marine Le Pen was convicted on embezzlement charges by a national court on Monday, sentenced to four years in prison and barred from seeking elected office for at least five years — a development that progressives warn could backfire if too many people see the ruling as an attempt to preemptively subvert democracy.
Le Pen’s “electoral ineligibility is effective immediately,” The New York Times reports and derails her presidential aspirations even as other right-wing politicians, including President Donald Trump in the United States and Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban, seek to consolidate their grip on power.
“Je suis Marine!” Orban declared on social media shortly after the verdict was handed down, which resulted in a visibly angry Le Pen storming out of the court room before the proceedings concluded.
The court suspended two years of Le Pen’s sentence, but the other two will be served under a form of house arrest with ankle bracelet monitoring.
While Jordan Bardella, president of the anti-immigrant National Rally (RN) party which Le Pen leads, said “French democracy was killed” by the verdict, the conviction followed a robust investigation and trial into to the RN’s payment scheme which siphoned millions of Euros out of taxpayer funds over many years.
According to the Guardian:
Le Pen and 24 party members, including nine former members of the European parliament and their 12 parliamentary assistants, were found guilty of a vast scheme over many years to embezzle European parliament funds, by using money earmarked for European parliament assistants to instead pay party workers in France.
The so-called fake jobs system covered parliamentary assistant contracts between 2004 and 2016, and was unprecedented in scale and duration, causing losses of €4.5m to European taxpayer funds. Assistants paid by the European parliament must work directly on Strasbourg parliamentary matters, which the judges found had not been the case.
Despite the immediate ban imposed on his political enemy, DiEm25 leader Yanis Varoufakis, the leftist former finance minister of Greece who also co-founded Progressive International, warned that barring politicians from running for office via court rulings that have not completed a full appeals process puts democracy on a dangerous road.
“This is nuts,” said Varoufakis in response to the conviction and sentencing.
The idea of lawfare, in which politicians or elected officials are targeted with frivolous or manufactured criminal charges in order to thwart their political careers is a well-known tactic that has often been used against left-leaning leaders as well.
“Lawfare is wrong whomever it targets,” he continued. “And it is stupid to boot. France’s neofascists will only benefit from this, just as the MAGA lot did. A panicking illiberal establishment across the West is diving headlong into a totalitarian pit.”
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