Jailing Marine Le Pen will only make her more popular

There was a vigorous interview on Tuesday morning on a prominent French radio station. The guest was Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a senior MP in Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, and the last question put to him concerned his leader’s impending trial on charges of financial impropriety. Tanguy had on two occasions to remind the presenter to stick to the conditional tense when talking about the charges; his interlocutor made it sound as if Le Pen was guilty until proven innocent.

She will be joined the dock in Paris next week by twenty-six other members of Rassemblement National, including Louis Aliot, the mayor of Perpignan. They are accused of the misappropriation of €7 million of European Union funds between 2004 and 2016; the prosecution claims that the defendants established a system in which the EU paid MEPs’ assistants who in fact worked directly for Rassemblement National. If convicted Le Pen could be imprisoned, fined or barred from standing for office.

If Le Pen were found guilty and barred from standing for election in 2027, she would be succeeded by her no. 2

Tanguy stuck to the party line during the interview: namely, the charges are a “masquerade” and just another example of the Paris and Brussels’ elite going after euroskeptic political parties. He referenced Francois Bayrou, the leader of the centrist MoDem, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far left La France Insoumise, as other figures who have been targeted on similar charges.

Bayrou was acquitted earlier this year but others in his party were found guilty (including five former MEPs); they received short, suspended prison sentences, fines of up to €50,000 and two years’ suspended ineligibility. Mélenchon’s party HQ was raided by police in 2018 and the investigation is ongoing. “Tomorrow they’ll find an excuse to throw me in the slammer… It’s not normal,” said Mélenchon in response to the initial raid.

The Paris elite are salivating at the prospect of seeing Le Pen in the dock; their populist bête noire, this rabble-rouser, guilty of every “ism” in the book, brought down to earth and, fingers crossed, disbarred from political life for years to come.

Such schadenfreude is misguided. The timing of the trial couldn’t be worse for Macron and his allies in Brussels. Le Pen will appear in court at the moment where she and her party are enjoying unprecedented power and popularity.

The support of Le Pen and her 125 MPs is essential to the survival of Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s new government; withdraw that support and Mélenchon’s left-wing coalition will bring down Barnier with a motion of no confidence, plunging France once more into chaos and confusion.

Just how much this government needs Le Pen continues to escape some its Macronist members. One, the boyish new finance minister, Antoine Armand, boasted on Tuesday that his door was open to everyone — including communists and the antisemitic far-left — except Rassemblement National.

Barnier was furious. He phoned Le Pen to apologize, then publicly rebuked the thirty-three-year-old Armand, who issued a groveling correction. Le Pen must have enjoyed his humiliation. In the coming weeks Rassemblement National will double down on Tanguy’s assertion: that this is nothing more than a show trial, a grubby attempt to take down a leader who threatens the EU establishment.

If wrongdoing has occurred it should be punished, but barring Le Pen from standing in the 2027 presidential election? It wouldn’t be a good look.

After all, this is the EU we’re talking about. At the start of this year a Dutch integrity investigation reported that 25 percent of the 704 MEPs from across the political spectrum had been implicated in some form of scandal. Nick Aiossa, director of Transparency International EU, told the investigation: “Fiddling allowances and expenses is a favorite pastime of many MEPs from many parties.” In most cases, however, added Aiossa, “if you violate the rules, you will not be penalized.”

Even the EU’s most senior figure, Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, has been unable to escape the whiff of scandal, in her case what has been dubbed “Pfizergate.” Investigations into a Covid vaccine deal — estimated to be €20 billion — between von der Leyen and the CEO of Pfizer are continuing with legal documents citing alleged “interference in public functions, destruction of SMS, corruption and conflict of interest.”

The investigation did not prevent MEPS re-electing von der Leyen the Commission president in July.

If Le Pen were found guilty and barred from standing for election in 2027, she would be succeeded by her no. 2, the charismatic Jordan Bardella. His youth and inexperience were exposed in the recent parliamentary elections, but he will be thirty-one in 2027 and a more mature and measured figure.

The Paris elite are seriously deluded if they believe putting Le Pen on the stand will shatter the popularity of her party. France’s leading political pollster, Jérôme Fourquet, remarked recently that Rassemblement National is no longer a party of protest; rather is one of conviction, more so than other political movement in France. The 10.5 million people who vote for Rassemblement National do so because they see it as their voice.

 “When it comes to immigration, security and purchasing power, the RN is in tune with a significant proportion of the population,” explained Fourquet. “The pariah status, hostility and class or intellectual contempt to which the RN politicians are subjected reflect what they too experience at their own level.”

In other words, it won’t just be Le Pen who is on trial next week. Her voters will feel like they too are in the dock.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.