This week, a French court found far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzling millions of euros of European Union funds and banned her from running for political office for five years – knocking the frontrunner out of the 2027 presidential race and enraging her supporters.
Coming so swiftly after Romania canceled the first-round election victory of a far-right candidate, Le Pen’s verdict has deepened a transatlantic debate about whether courts risk disenfranchising voters by removing a politician from electoral competition.
Le Pen’s case is becoming a political Rorschach test. Critics say the court’s decision is another instance of liberal elites weaponizing the judiciary to bar their political rivals from power. Supporters say the decision shows institutions working as designed, prosecuting any citizen who is guilty of a crime regardless of their political stripes and the potential backlash.
For the first camp, “the will of the people” ought to be supreme. For the second, adhering to the “rule of law” outweighs voters’ demands.
The two cases have stoked fury among Europe’s right-wing nationalists, Donald Trump and many members of his administration, who feel the US president was subjected to similar acts of “lawfare” to try to stop him winning a second term. He is the first convicted felon to become president.
“The Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going so far as to put that Opponent in prison,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social.
“When the radical left can’t win via a democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents,” Trump’s billionaire aide Elon Musk wrote on X after Monday’s verdict. “This is their standard playbook throughout the world.”
Vice President JD Vance has also singled out Romania as an instance of what he sees as democratic backsliding in Europe. Calin Georgescu unexpectedly won the first round of its presidential vote in November, but Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after intelligence services suggested Russia had interfered to boost his TikTok campaign, which he and Moscow denied. The electoral bureau later banned Georgescu from May’s rerun, after prosecutors charged him with establishing a fascist group and other crimes.
