Marine Le Pen has been knocked out of the presidential race and disqualified from standing for public office after she was convicted of misappropriating public funds. She has been given a suspended prison sentence, will have to wear an ankle bracelet for two years, is barred from standing for office for five years, and has been fined €100,000.
Her path to the Élysée has, for now, been blocked by the courts rather than the electorate. Some will see this as a triumph of justice over populism, the rule of law asserting itself against an increasingly threatening far-right. But look more closely at the legal reasoning behind the decision, and the picture is far more ambiguous. What brought Le Pen down was not corruption in the way it is understood in Britain or the United States, but rather a distinctly continental – and profoundly bureaucratic – conception of political authority.
To many British observers, the idea that employing political staff to carry out political work could result in criminal conviction – let alone disqualification from public life – is absurd
The case stems from her time as a Member of the European Parliament, during which she employed assistants who, the court found, were in fact working for her party, the Rassemblement National, rather than for the European Parliament itself. Under French law, that constitutes ‘détournement d’argent public’ – misappropriation of public funds. The total amount involved in relation to Le Pen, according to the court, was €474,000 (approximately £400,000). The court expressly stated that there was no personal enrichment – the funds in question were used by the party, not diverted for private gain. Yet the court’s ruling has rendered her ineligible to run for elected office. However, the final outcome may still depend on a separate matter currently before France’s constitutional court, which is due to rule on Wednesday. While that case does not concern Le Pen directly, it will determine how broadly the ineligibility sanction can be applied – and will affect whether her disqualification ultimately stands.
To many British or American observers, the idea that employing political staff to carry out political work could result in criminal conviction – let alone disqualification from public life – is absurd. In Westminster or Washington, a parliamentary assistant is expected to help an elected official do precisely that: conduct politics. That may include liaising with the party, drafting speeches, advising on strategy, or even preparing for future campaigns. It is understood that staff serve the elected representative, not some abstract, institutional ideal.
But in the French legal tradition – and even more so in the European Parliament – the logic is reversed. Assistants paid out of public funds are expected to serve the institution, not the individual. To use them for work that advances a party’s national agenda is, in this view, not just inappropriate but criminal. The assumption is that legitimacy lies with the state – or in Brussels, with the European institutions – not with those elected by the people.
This is not a minor cultural distinction. It reflects fundamentally different visions of democratic authority. In the Anglo-American tradition, the mandate flows from the voter to the elected official, who then brings in staff to help implement that mandate. In the French – and more broadly southern European – model, the official is merely a temporary custodian of an institutional role, one that remains subject to bureaucratic constraint and judicial oversight. The staffer is presumed to be a servant of the administration, not of the political project.
That mindset is what has now taken down Le Pen. She is not accused of taking bribes or enriching herself. She is not charged with siphoning money into offshore accounts. She is being punished for using parliamentary assistants to support her political party – a practice that would be seen in most democracies as entirely ordinary. In France, it is treated as theft.
The Le Pen ruling follows a pattern in French political life: the use of judicial processes to resolve electoral problems. This is not to say Le Pen is above the law, or that her actions were beyond scrutiny. But the law being applied is based on a vision of public service in which politics itself is suspect – unless carefully controlled, sanitised, and separated from the institutions it seeks to direct.
The irony is that the European Parliament, which has long struggled for democratic legitimacy, is the very body insisting that its staff serve its bureaucratic purpose rather than the politicians elected to sit in it. That Le Pen has been brought down by this logic – the idea that political activity amounts to a misuse of public resources – is both grotesque and revealing.
The leading candidate in the forthcoming presidential election has been removed not by voters, but by a judicial decision rooted in a highly administrative interpretation of the law. When courts, rather than the electorate, decide who may stand for office, it signals a shift in the balance of democratic authority away from the people, and towards the institutions meant to serve them.
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