Stop blaming the courts (and really, the legislature for making the law).
Le Pen is the person responsible, as is her party: Don't commit crimes, don't make leaders of people who commit crimes, and you won't have problems.
Yes, there is a potential for abuse, but eliminating the rule of law for political leaders is very dangerous. (Edit: You can't take a popular vote on whether someone - especially a political leader, and one in a populist movement - committed a crime.)
The problem is that criminal laws can't be applied, even in principle, without the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Criminal laws are written broadly and legislatures trust prosecutors to apply the laws to the subset of conduct that falls within the arguable letter of the law. That makes prosecution of political figures incredibly dangerous, because prosecution is inherently a discretionary act.
Consider 18 USC 1343:
> Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
A politically motivated prosecutor willing to stretch phrases like "property" and "false ... representations" could use 18 USC 1343 to turn minor infractions into federal felonies with the prospect of 20 years in prison. It's entirely up to the prosecutor to ensure that the atomic bomb of 18 USC 1343 is applied only to conduct that actually warrants such extreme charges.
I'd note that, had Jim Comey been willing to push the law as far as the words would allow, he would've had a legal basis to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felonies relating to handling of classified information: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-dir.... Comey's statement in connection with the decision to recommend no charges is instructive:
> Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.
>Criminal laws are written broadly and legislatures trust prosecutors to apply the laws to the subset of conduct that falls within the arguable letter of the law.
Not in France. You Brits and Americans have that weird Common Law system that relies on broad "laws" (more principles, really), judicial precedent and court decisions, whereas France and most of the world's judiciaries adopted Romans and Napoleon's Civil law system where the legislators write detailed legal codes that the courts then apply.
Is that true of criminal law? (Genuine question, I know zilch about European criminal law.) Does French law have the concept of prosecutorial discretion?
Comon law proved to be more adaptable to different customs and cultures. Almost all of frances colonies sank into lawless despotism. Meanwhile many english colonies are or were vibeant lawruled democracies, even while beeing poor .
> he would've had a legal basis to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felonies
America is currently ann argument against popular democracy. Before we concede that electoral politics don’t work in a world with social media, maybe we can give increased prosecutorial discretion a chance. The alternative, after all, is just more authoritarian.
The voting system (FPTP) in the US results in a two party system which isn't representative of a good democratic system imo. Considering all of the different political divides I don't think two parties sufficiently cover the spectrum of opinions/stances.
> voting system (FPTP) in the US results in a two party system which isn't representative of a good democratic system imo
We have non-FPTP jurisdictions. They still default to partisanship. (The problem is probably too many elections, not enough reliance on appointment and selection by lot.)
Quite the opposite! Democracy is working in America, whereas it’s in jeopardy in (some parts of) Europe. You’re confusing “democracy” with “liberalism.” Democracy is not about free trade, or protecting immigrants, or the like. It’s about people being able to vote to live in the kind of society they want. If people want to pull back on liberalism in certain areas that’s democratic. What’s undemocratic is saying that “you can vote for anything you want as long as it’s liberalism.”
There’s a reaction throughout the entire west to free trade and immigration. In America, a plurality of voters supported the guy who promised mass deportations and tariffs, and now they’re getting exactly what they voted for. Maybe they won’t like the results, maybe they’ll be thrilled with them. The results will simply inform the next vote. What’s deeply broken are european systems that are trying to maintain liberalism at the expense of democracy.
But not all the european countries. Denmark and Sweden have retrenched on liberalism in the area of immigration—Denmark’s youngest generation is now more Danish than the population as a whole—and have largely solved the political polarization over the issue. That’s democracy working very well.
Essential and the most important part of modern democracy is freedom: Universal, individual human rights. It is the foundation of the US: 'All men are created equal and are endowed with inalienable rights ...', the land of liberty, home of the free, liberty and justice for all. The Constitution's limited remit to government, and the specific limits, are about freedom and self-determination.
And that's certainly liberal - that is the same foundation of classical liberalism and modern left-wing liberalism.
It's absurd to suggest otherwise; it's pointless arguments about verbiage. Nobody wants mob rule, nobody thinks of democracy without human rights and indvidual freedom, either scholars or the general public.
> It’s about people being able to vote to live in the kind of society they want.
Why should they get to decide en masse what people do individually? That's just dictatorhip of the majority, of the mob. Freedom is what the US and democracy are about.
> Democracy is not about free trade, or protecting immigrants, or the like.
> It’s about people being able to vote to live in the kind of society they want. If people want to pull back on liberalism in certain areas that’s democratic.
Sure. And when the Athenians recalled Alcibiades [1] or put Socrates to death, that was democratic. I’m not arguing it’s not democratic. I’m arguing those were self-destructive acts that show the system didn’t work.
Note that I’m making a distinctly illiberal argument. In that, I dovetail with Trump’s supporters.
But the system worked! Immigration and the economy consistently rank as voters’ two key issues. On immigration, the decades-long elite consensus was for more immigration, including illegal immigration. But voters successfully defeated that elite consensus. They voted for mass deportations, got a guy who has started doing mass deportations, and as of the latest Yougov/CBS polling, overwhelmingly approve of Trump’s deportation program (58% approve, 42% oppose): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opinion-poll-trump-economy-tari....
Voters being able to override elite consensus to effectuate change to make the country more like what they want is the system working!
> But the system worked! Immigration and the economy consistently rank as voters’ two key issues
If immigration were the only thing this administration were doing we wouldn’t be having this debate.
The system isn’t working. We’re deterministically heading towards a world where we’re poorer and less secure based on policies (tariffs on Europe, Canada and Mexico) and people (Lutnick, Hegseth) that weren’t ever brought up in the election. Even if that had been campaigned on, the fact that the majority chooses stupid policies is an indictment of electoral politics. If the system “working” leads to its own destruction, it doesn’t work.
I notice that you've retreated to cherry picking polls on specific issues now that Trump's overall approval rating according to poll aggregators is negative (in record time, in fact, with the exception of Trump's first term).
Maybe we just need to stop quitting and capitulating, and commit to our liberty and self-determination. Prior generations committed their 'lives, fortunes, and honor'. We just need to fix social media, which will take an activated society.
Are you prepared to give several Trump appointed judges prosecutorial discretion over who can run in the midterms and 2028?
The problem that prosecutorial discretion will have to overcome is selective enforcement, or the perception thereof. The right wing European media is claiming this was common practice across parties. Now I don't know the truth of it, but it is a hard thought to get out of ones head, and a hard negative to prove.
wrt Le Pen, I find it noteworthy that evey English news article I have read avoids describing the actual crime [1], Which does seem more substantial than 99% of the Trump cases.
This works differently in France. Americans need to stop comparing everything to their own country, your country not as great a democracy as you might think.
Accounting politicians for crimes is not a problem as long as the judicial system is sufficiently independent from the executive. It is my impression that the French justice system is more independent and better protected against the executive branch than the US justice system, but I admit that I'm not an expert on comparing the two systems and could be wrong. It's really just a hunch aggregated from what I've heard over the years.
It is looks very similar in France and in the US to some extent. I copy a post I made somewhere in this thread as I think it can help here:
Prosecutors are formally under executive control but since 2013 the justice minister should not give orders on individual cases.
France has an additional layer of independence compared to the U.S. because of the juge d’instruction (investigating judge), who is supposed to be independent from the executive like the courts judges, unlike prosecutors.
I say in principle because judges are appointed in France and not elected (similarly to federal judge in the US from what I understood). The executive as some control through appointments and career advancements but they are not supposed to use it to sanction or reward the judges.
The effectiveness of these independence mechanisms remains a subject of active debate, as evidenced by the relatively recent changes made to them.
That is all true but in this case she was sentenced to 2 years prison and 2 years house arrest, it's not exactly locking her up and throwing away the key for a minor infraction.
Letting judges bar someone from running for office is silly though, if French law allows that they should reconsider; if someone is popular enough to win a national election despite a reasonable criminal conviction they are popular enough to threaten the civil order if they are barred from office.
I mean that, in general, criminal laws can be interpreted to take minor wrongdoings and turn them into serious crimes. I’m not saying that was the case with Le Pen.
In fact, I think the conflict between law enforcement and politics in the Le Pen case is largely self-inflicted. There was no need to include the constraint on running for office in the punishment. And it seems like the wrongful conduct ended in 2017. Why did it take so long to work through to a verdict?
That is a problem, yet the law must still be enforced. There is no perfect solution but that isn't an argument for lawlessness, especially for powerful political leaders.
Most importantly, whatever the prosecutor does they cannot convict someone. That must be done by a court, an independent agency (in the US).
> That is a problem, yet the law must still be enforced.
Tellingly, you’re phrasing that in the passive voice, as if “the law” is “enforced” by higher beings sitting outside the political process. It is not. The enforcement of criminal laws is a political act, performed by political actors. And it is an inherently discretionary political act. Prosecutors actually have no obligation to enforce the law in every circumstance.
> There is no perfect solution but that isn't an argument for lawlessness, especially for powerful political leaders.
It’s not an argument for lawlessness, but rather an argument for viewing the political act of law enforcement as being secondary to the ultimate political act of electing leadership in any scenario where those two things could be seen as being in conflict.
Put differently, you have to see prosecution and elections as political acts that both seek to vindicate the will of the people. After all, criminal prosecutions are brought on behalf of the People to vindicate the public interest in law and order, not private rights. So it’s perfectly legitimate to ask whether, under particular circumstances, it’s more important to enforce some criminal law—especially one unrelated to elections—or whether it’s more important to ensure the public can choose its leaders through elections.
> you’re phrasing that in the passive voice, as if “the law” is “enforced” by higher beings sitting outside the political process. It is not. The enforcement of criminal laws is a political act, performed by political actors. And it is an inherently discretionary political act. Prosecutors actually have no obligation to enforce the law in every circumstance.
If you read my comments (maybe not in that one?), I agree and say that often. We must work with human institutions; that's not argument that they can't work, work well, or are useless. I can't think of an advanced democracy that has used that discretion to block a serious candidate (one who could win).
> It’s not an argument for lawlessness, but rather an argument for viewing the political act of law enforcement as being secondary to the ultimate political act of electing leadership in any scenario where those two things could be seen as being in conflict.
It would allow political actors to break laws with impunity - probably the most dangerous threat to the rule of law is from powerful political actors - simply because there is an election in the future.
> as if “the law” is “enforced” by higher beings sitting outside the political process
But this is what we get if embezzlement (and insurrection) go unpunished. Someone we look to outside and above the legal system to mete out retribution.
No, you’ve inverted my point. The political system must be all encompassing. Everything must be within and subject to the political system. The legal system should not be all encompassing—it should stop short of serious conflict with the political system.
Thus, in some extreme cases, the remedy for misconduct should be elections, or impeachment, not prosecutions.
> The political system must be all encompassing. Everything must be within and subject to the political system
Why? This is de facto what we have in America. It’s lead to neo-Peronism. It doesn’t work.
The next Democrat candidate could recapitulate Trump’s January 6th pardons by promising to pardon anyone who burns down Teslas. If the rest of their platform is tenable, and if the Tesla fires are a few years in the past, the electorate might be fine with that. (Or not. Either way, the damage gets done.)
Do that for long enough and the public will demand someone outside the political system to rule over it. If you leave the final word on corruption to the political system, the system will evolve an autocratic element that polices itself.
> hope you are not comparing those things - one trying to overthrow democracy and killed people, the other vandalism that damages cars
One can compare things without equating them. In this case, yes, I am comparing them. (In the end, both have—to date—been nothing more than destruction of property and trespassing. Getting killed being an idiot isn’t the same as killing people.)
- laws selectively enforced where this person never gets charged, yet this person gets put in prison for the exact same thing
- a byzantine legal code that the average person can't understand ("show me the man, and I'll show you the crime")
Now take that and layer on top a competitive legal system where your political opponent doesn't have to defeat you at the ballot box, they can just get you disqualified by having you convicted of a crime.
It's a system that is ripe for abuse.
Bobby Sands sticks out for me - a member of the Provisonal IRA who became a Member of Parliament while in British Prison. I thought it reflected quite well on the UK - despite this man committing violent acts in an effort to break Northern Ireland away from the UK, he was allowed to stand in Parliament of the very same system.
Then look at the Singapore system - even a relatively minor conviction like defamation (a fine only) will disqualify you from office. A fact the ruling party has used again, and again and again to eliminate opposition politicians once they get popular enough.
No system or person is perfect; no god will come down and save us; we need to find solutions using human institutions. What also is ripe for abuse is a system where politicians have impunity for corruption. At least being arrested, prosecuted, and convicted requires several agencies and branches of government and a public trial that follows laws.
Democracy has done very well in that regard. The US is an exception, in many ways, in that it generally won't prosecute current heads of state. Netanyahu is being prosecuted and investigated for another crime, even after abusing power to avoid it. France has charged sitting high officials, so have others.
But what is gained from barring people convicted of a crime from holding public office?
- Keeping people out with questionable character?
- Preventing crimes from being committed while in office?
Neither of those are all that convincing. Voters will be aware of the criminal past of any candidate. They can make their own personal judgement when they vote.
And I’m not sure what you mean by democracy has “worked well in that regard except for the US”.
If your goal is to ban people with criminal records to prevent corruption, there are plenty of democracies with a far worse track record when it comes to democracy than the US.
> Voters will be aware of the criminal past of any candidate. They can make their own personal judgement when they vote.
My father straight up told me: I know nothing of this case, but it's obviously a set-up by leftist judges. People don't care about the truth anymore...
If people cheat in a contest and you don't disqualify them, you give everyone an incentive to cheat: ideally they get away with not being found out, but even if they are found out their cheating can still have a positive RoI.
The only way to keep things fair is to exclude those who deliberately flaunt the rules, as is the case here.
But even aside from that, someone who deliberately breaks the rules isn't fit to enforce them.
> someone who deliberately breaks the rules isn’t fit to enforce them
To give an American example, if someone deliberately broke Jim Crow laws in the South they should be disqualified from office?
The problem with this approach is that it assumes court decisions are always just and correct. Based on numerous examples I don’t think that’s a reasonable assumption.
Versus the opposite approach which says criminal convictions don’t automatically disqualify you, it’s up to the voters to decide if you’re fit for office.
I don't think every criminal conviction should disqualify someone from running for office, but definitely every election-related crime. If you embezzle funds to instead market yourself for the election, who's to say you won't use your new government power for the same purpose?
Who's to say that you won't use your new power to help your party colleagues get away with the same crime, but this time without the public knowing about it?
We could start by using election-related crimes as disqualifying events. Did you embezzle money to further your campaign? Sorry, you aren't allowed to participate.
Unless a justice system is captured by one party (like in the US), I trust it more to determine the truth than I trust politicians that want to abuse such "loopholes".
Lets continue the comparisons, instead of attacking the credibility of French courts, who have a fantastic reputation of making politicians of all sides of the political spectrum accountable...
It's hard not to notice a pattern here. Posts involving DOGE, Elon Musk, or critical takes on the erosion of legal norms in the U.S. are flagged within seconds.
It tells the story of a Maryland father wrongly imprisoned in El Salvador due to an "administrative error." The U.S. government admitted fault in court, yet refuses to take corrective action. Silence follows.
Meanwhile, a post discussing Marine Le Pen...A MAGA adjacent figure remains untouched. Funny how moderation seems oddly selective when certain
narratives are involved.
Not sure about which law you're talking about but she couldn't have voted for a law that applied to her case as she was elected to the Assemblée Nationale in 2017.
The case she has been sentenced for is about facts that happened before that, while she was a member of the European Parliament (until 2016).
You're absolutely right. My fault. I should have checked what I read. Unfortunately, I cannot change the original comment any longer. In any case, given their involvement in embezzlement the Front National/Rassemblement National would likely not vote for laws against corruption.
> Don't commit crimes, don't make leaders of people who commit crimes, and you won't have problems.
Not to be disrespectful, but this is naive.
In a perfect world only "real" crimes would be prosecuted.
But almost every despot prosecuted their opponents by claiming they were criminals. Remember Nelson Mandela spent decades in prison as a criminal. The leaders of the KPD & SPD parties were both arrested as criminals during Nazi Germany. Putin has arrested many of his opponents, citing criminal behavior.
Saying "don't commit crimes" overlooks that the "crimes" themselves may not be real.
I read the part >>don't make leaders of people who commit crimes, as covering that scenario . Arresting people for "crimes" of getting in your way to power, is a crime in and of itself - even if it is not on the books, so don't make leaders of them.
It's not naive. I agree the world isn't perfect, but we have to operate with imperfect human systems - that's life. More imperfect is politicians with impunity for corruption - at least when they arrest someone, there is rule of law, it requires a trial (even a jury, if the defendant desires), etc.
You are reaching far beyond France to South Africa's minority dictatorship and Nazi Germany for examples. The latter is a great example of political leaders with impunity.
Can you provide any examples at all in modern democracies, at any level of government?
- Israel, where the Netanyahu's trial is commonly seen (by both sides!) as a way to prevent Netanyahu from serving as the PM.
- Arguably, US with the Trump conviction.
These are the ones I'm personally aware of, it's more than likely there are better examples.
(In a "no true scotsman" way of thinking, it's easy to debunk any such cases by saying they're bad examples of a democracy. Then again, it's the same argument with any political system — proponents of communism will say that communism was never implemented properly, for example.)
I don't know what that means, but Russia is not a democracy - the people don't have self-determination to choose their government. Nor is Belarus.
Anyway, what are these examples of? When in a real democracy has a court corrupted the democratic process? Not in Ukraine either - their laws just push off elections during wartime IIRC. And was that done by the courts? Have they jailed the opposition?
Sure, not a court per se — it was apparently the country's national security and defense council that took the decision to ban the parties from any political activity.
But I agree, it's whatever.
> Trump was elected after that!
Yep, despite well-documented efforts to block him from running. The outcome is I think a win for democracy. That democrats think of this as a defeat is amusing to me. (I'm an foreigner and don't live or vote in the US, so no horse in the race either way.)
By not wasting time on intentional time-wasting arguments.
> That democrats think of this as a defeat is amusing to me.
Not most Democrats that I've seen - they wanted the law followed (for future reference: Democratic party members are Democrats, those who favor democracy are democrats).
For those wondering whether this is targeted harrassment, France has a long history of this kind of sentence for people of all political stripes. Wikipedia has 108 pages covering just the most significant ones: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:Personnalit%C3%...
Wouldn't matter. Trump is already a felon and should be ineligible. We have at least two parallel lehal systems in the US, probably more. The more "important" you are the less the rules are able to touch you. That's the american way.
The Wikipedia article has "deprival of the rights of individuals and parties from running for election" listed as a method. So I assume the prison/fine part of the sentencing wouldn't really be defensive democracy but barring her from office is. (Don't think I would feel positively about that in the U.S. but nonetheless the concept is there.)
That's the case in any working democracy. Defensive democracy is a different conception, e.g. the German constitution allows for party prohibitions. In a defensive democracy, rules like party prohibitions are ideally not applied by an ordinary court but by an independent political organ. To give an example from Germany, the German Supreme Court is an independent political organ that serves as a power division element to check the work of the two parliaments for constitutionality. The "highest" ordinary court is the Bunderverwaltungsgericht.
Hehe, now let’s wait and see how they grapple with the fact that you can’t have both! It‘s either criminal use of EU funds or defensive democracy, unless you’re drenched in kool-aid.
The verdict was clearly and unambiguously about a criminal abuse of EU funds and nothing else. It's noteworthy that a list of people was sentenced for it, not just Le Pen.
sure, and just 4 days prior to that totally neutral verdict another french court ruled that political bans were legal. what a coincidence, what a convenience. something that was never even considered legal in France just “clearly and unambiguously” fell into that judge’s hands days ahead.
No, there’s nothing noteworthy here, especially for a crime Le Pen didn’t committed herself and which every single party of France is guilty of.
You're talking to the wrong person since I would fully support a prohibition of the RN if France's democracy was as combative as it should be. I just don't think this played a role here. Politicians complaining bitterly about being persecuted for crimes they've committed is not a new thing, though, they always believe they deserve special treatment.
Excuse me but what in the hell? To come in here and redefine a corruption investigation as being in that camp is not only an insult to the reader but it an insult to everyone who both cares about civil rights and government corruption at the same time.
Defensive democracy is just marketing spin on exactly the sort of civil rights violating process that gives the establishment huge advantage over any challenger and exactly the sort of crap totalitarian regimes love and leverage to great effect.
The wikipedia page that you linked lists the following examples of "defensive democracy".
>Surveillance by the security corps (especially military and police intelligence) of activists who are considered dangerous, or after entire associations outright;
>Restrictions on the freedom of movement or action over bodies suspected of endangering democracy;
>Deprival of the rights of individuals and parties from running for election
>Outlawing of organizations considered a danger to democracy;
>Cancellation of elections as a last resort ""
Does that sound like the kind of stuff that fair, well run by rule of law, stable democracies with lots of buy in from the populace do to you? Because it sure doesn't to me. It's basically a list of stuff unpopular governments use to stay in power a little longer.
To come in and lay claim to the credibility of of something that everyone can agree is good (prosecuting corruption, equality under the law) and siphon some of that off onto a subject that is highly controversial (selective violations of civil rights, nominally for a good reason) by just falsely claiming the good thing is a subset of the controversial thing is dishonest and morally reprehensible.
You are just confused because you bought the democracy fairy tale. There is no "real" democracy. There are nation states and in this case it is the French nation state. Politicians come and go but the state (also known for some reason as the deep state) made of bureaucrats, military personal, intelligence, etc... are not going to let some random dude rule over the country just because he got 50%+ of the population electing him. That's the pipe dream of democracy but not the reality.
I'm thinking a certain level of bureaucracy is needed even in the most democratic of governments, after all we don't (normally) elect folks to argue about whats in each others underwear. We talk about "running" the country. We want laws, statutes, organizations, and sometimes the tasks and end goals are big enough with these constructs to the point where they should span election cycles. Sure, currently the US is in "burn it all down" mode but this is not efficient government at all. This "burn everything down" thing with every election cycle just spends our nations resources to no good end.
Course, the problem with democracy is that if you elect a crook, you'll get a crime ring haha but I guess democracy also means giving folks what they ask for.
>Does that sound like the kind of stuff that fair, well run by rule of law, stable democracies with lots of buy in from the populace do to you?
...Yes?
Or are you saying politicians can just barge in and say "the rules don't apply to me because I'm popular"? Because that's how you don't get stable democracies. What you get is Trump, or the Red Brigades, or the Brown Shirts running things to the ground. Because the motto of those orgs is "one man, one vote... One last time"
Are you okay with Trump having the power to do each of those quoted actions? To decide if the opposition is a threat to democracy or if elections must be canceled "as a last resort".
I read that list and it looks like instructions on how to end democracy, not preserve it
Not advocating for that specific list of actions, but the idea is that the courts have the power to do those kinds of things, not politicians. That's the whole point - you set up the legal system in a way that helps to keep democracy stable and then the courts enforce that so politicians don't have untrammelled power. That's (theoretically) why the judiciary is a separate branch of government.
Americans made their bed, now let them lay in it. Ideally those tools would have been used against him, but since they weren't... now is the time to reap the results of that inaction.
Every democracy has a failure point. The US seems to be past that now, where the executive is starting to ignore the judicial branch. In my view, if the institutions were working correctly, Trump would never have been able to stand again after January 6th, and this would have been as a result of judgements by judges appointed by the executive. But institutions are run by humans and sometimes nothing can save them.
Moot point as someone like Trump ignores existing tools and just makes his own.
Also, Trump could have been stopped by the processes in place in USA, they just were not properly used. There were several cases open against him, they just failed to do what they were supposed to.
That's not the problem. The US now effectively has a system where you don't prosecute presidents for any crime. You should note that the ongoing criminal investigations against Trump were mostly cancelled when it became obvious that he'll be the next president.
If this system had been in place when Nixon did his crimes, he would've just shrugged and kept going.
You are indeed not Europe now, not even close. Well, except for Hungary and Belarus.
You are again comparing the flawed US "democratic" system to a real democracy. Trump should not be able to gain those tools because a functioning democracy protects the rule of law and holds justice to be above all other concepts. In the US, the legal system is a sham and the levers of power are easily taken for abuse (not to mention corporate capture of the two political parties which control all political life). So while Trump should not be able to capture those tools, it is only possible because the US does not have a real functioning democracy. In places like France, the state ensures that it is not possible to easily take complete power as Trump has in the US.
In short, no, Trump should not be able to take these tools. But in actual democracies they have checks to ensure that this is not possible while in the US no such checks exist.
I didn’t ask if Trump should be able to take those tools.
I asked if you would be comfortable if he did.
Either you believe it is possible to create a perfect political system which never makes a mistake, or you believe mistakes can be made thus those tools should never be available to those in power.
>Or are you saying politicians can just barge in and say "the rules don't apply to me because I'm popular"?
I hope you misrepresent due to ignorance and not deliberately.
Nobody is saying that politicians should not be investigated. And nobody is saying that politicians should not be convicted and even put in prison.
What people are rightfully baffled about is the riddance of the passive election right - as in, inability to be elected. If a candidate was convinced and is in prison, then it's up to the voters to decide if they still trust that person and if they consider the conviction rightful and not bias.
Surely, if the conviction was pure as a tear of a newborn baby and there was no dirty persecution of the political competitors, surely voters would take that into account and there would be no need for artificial restrictions. But that requires the absence of political hunt. One needs to impose artificial restrictions only if there is fault play.
The EU is taking the tried and tested ways Putin used to destroy his opposition. First Romania, now France.
P.S. The same critique applies to the American democratic travesty of "current/former criminals are not allowed to vote".
The trouble with this is that a criminal that has enough capital to back him/her can use the media to make it seem like it's a political hunt even when it isn't. Supporters of a corrupt criminal will benefit a lot from getting them elected, whereas the opposition needs to spend a lot of money just to keep things as they are. Usually these people are friendly to capital as well, and the opposition are the "little people" who can't organize enough money to campaign against these liars and their backers. I can't see better options here other than to use the state to protect themselves.
At some point we have to trust the electorate whether we like it or not, or democracy is impossible. If the populace is easily brainwashed by the media to believe in the innocence of a corrupt and extremist candidate they could just as easily be brainwashed on any issue or candidate so what's the point of letting them vote at all?
> Usually these people are friendly to capital as well, and the opposition are the "little people"
Don't know if this is actually true, I assume capitalists generally prefer stable market-oriented politicians and not far-right kleptocrats in favor of protectionist trade wars. And plenty of wealthy people value democracy for its own sake, Kamala outraised Trump in the 2024 election for example.
Also I doubt traditional media spend plays as large a role in a nationwide contest with a lot of eyes, if I recall during Trump's 2016 primary candidacy Fox News tried to go against him but was rebuked by their own viewers (who fell in love with him on social media) and forced to bend the knee.
Cults of personalities are more dangerous than other types of brainwashing though, and the right level of protection from the state here should be other checks and balances on the office's powers.
I'm starting to think that current forms of democracy have become outdated and impossible due to the effects of social media and the levels of wealth concentration. When liars can spread their own truths through social media, and there exists such concentrations of wealth that they're able to buy the platforms, manipulate the algorithms, use bots etc. to boost the lies, it's become too hard for the average person to figure out what the actual truth is and base their decisions on that. The fact checking and bias in dispersed traditional media that we used to have was not perfect, but it was better than what we have now with the combination of concentrated traditional media and social media.
If we don't want to use the state to protect democracy by limiting it, then we either need to limit the concentration of wealth so that no small group of people has the power to spread the lies, or we need new forms of democracy that are resistant to such things.
The Romania-ization of European democracies has just begun. Once Brussels sends „democracy-protecting“ tanks into the capitals of its member states, the „EU-SSR-meme“ will have successfully completed the „conspiracy“ life cycle we‘ve become so adjusted to lately (conspiracy > meme > reality). Just remember to, in the meantime, de-humanize every complainer as „Putin-Puppet“ because how else can we protect democracy if not by eliminating dissent, eh?
I've heard people on the radio (ha yes I listen to that ;-)) that they disagree with Le Pen being banned from running for president.
That seems strange to me as this was public (eu) money that was funneled into her own movement, i.e. bolstering her popularity in some way. So letting her run in the elections would basically mean she would get away with the fraude.
At the risk of just repeating a previous comment, if you actually want to live in a democracy you have to trust the electorate at some level. I don't know the specifics of this case but if it's clear cut corruption it should be easy to make that case to the electorate and absolutely destroy Le Pen in the election.
If it's not that easy, then banning her from running is even worse.
That's what happened - some officials trusted the electorate at some level and decided that the rules the electorate chose to make via their representatives should be followed. Those officials also trust the electorate to change the rules if they want to.
That's a very charitable way of explaining away literally anything.
Let me try:
It's not like Putin started a war, but rather some officials trusted the electorate at some level and decided that the rules the electorate chose to make via their representatives should be followed. The representatives being Putin and friends. Those officials also trust the electorate to change the rules if they want to.
There were no actual attempts at a coup btw, so the electorate is evidently happy with this.
Ultimately, rules come from the people in a democracy.
If they decide they want a candidate who broke the rules, that's where it gets messy in political philosophy.
Should the democratic will of the people from years ago or decades ago override the democratic will of the people now? Of course that's the general idea of having constitutions and such, but it can only ever be a matter of degree, and there's no right answer as to how much.
Rules should be followed. If when rules are broken no punishment is applied, the rules are meaningless. Once rules become meaningless, everyone will be emboldened to break the rules, to the detriment of society as a whole.
If you want the rules changed, vote for them being changed, don't give free pass for any asshole to break them.
But free, democratic elections is a "rule" too -- not just a rule, but a bedrock principle.
Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate? Why should someone from the past be allowed to nullify my preferred vote in the present?
There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office. The question is whether it's outweighed by other democratic concerns. It's messy.
> Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate? Why should someone from the past be allowed to nullify my preferred vote in the present?
All elections follow rules set by a previous electorate unless you want to first vote on defining the rules for an election every time you have an election.
If Trump were to actually run for a 3rd term, would you argue that he should be able to because term limits were set in place by a previous electorate?
Obviously they have to follow the rules for how to count votes, establish boundaries, etc.
But there is definitely a serious philosophical argument that term limits are inherently undemocratic.
I personally think they're necessary, but at the same time I realize they are undemocratic. They're literally taking away the ability for an electorate to freely choose.
All I'm saying is, the tradeoffs get messy. Restricting candidates from running can be a slippery slope. Look at what's happening in Turkey, where the popular opposition candidate was just barred from running. How do you know when you've gone too far? Barring candidates can corruptly entrench power, even when following the "rules" to the letter. What then?
This entire argument can be summarized as "no popular politician should ever have to obey any law." I realize you'll respond that you don't mean anything that extreme, of course. But the set of principles you're trying to articulate are, in fact, exactly that extreme. I don't want to live in that world and neither will you, when you have to experience it.
Erdogan has consolidated power independently and undemocratically and is using it to jail his opponents. That is completely different from this situation where a politician is engaging in anti-democratic actions and is then barred from running by an independent judiciary.
> term limits are inherently undemocratic
A society where the people are not able to participate in the electoral process is not a democratic society. True democracies represent the will of all people, regardless of whether they are part of the majority or whether they were eligible to vote in the single election which transitioned the political system from democracy to dictatorship.
Oh, Erdogan consolidated his power over the last few decades democratically. Rural turks came out in mass to vote for him over past decades. Incidentally, in the past he was actually jailed by his political opponents and banned from politics.
> Look at what's happening in Turkey, where the popular opposition candidate was just barred from running.
Ironically Turkey is in this situation precisely because Erdogan removed term limits and spent decades consolidating his power. Same with China where Xi Jinping did the same. And Russia with Putin. All prime examples of functioning democracies, right?
These rules are specially to prevent people from setting themselves up as emperor for life and if they are removed that's almost always the exact thing that happens.
Democracy isn't a perfect system, as much as Americans tend to believe it is. It needs some guidelines to keep it functional. And even with them it's a compromise, not perfection.
> Why was she the only one barred from running from office?
Because she was judged by an independent court and found guilty of embezzlement.
> Why not the other eight officials also found guilty?
I would have to read the decision to give this answer. Many things are considered when a judge gives out a sentence. Two murders may result in different prison length depending on circumstances, for example.
> The crimes of which Ms Le Pen has been convicted are serious, but not of the same order. France’s harsh sentence in this case limits the choice of citizens who are capable of judging for themselves who should get their vote. By creating a mechanism that politicians might be thought to have co-opted, the law encourages talk of conspiracy—especially if, like Ms Le Pen, the barred politician belongs to a party that is founded upon a suspicion of the elites.
> The danger of courts aggressively sentencing politicians is that both the law and the courts become seen as partisan. Judiciaries rely on citizens accepting verdicts with which they disagree. Elections are supposed to generate consent for the incoming government. A poll after Ms Le Pen’s conviction found just 54% of French thought she was treated like any other accused, a narrow margin of confidence in judicial independence. Among RN voters, 89% thought she was singled out for political reasons.
> France’s harsh sentence in this case limits the choice of citizens who are capable of judging for themselves who should get their vote.
That vote would be tainted by her embezzlement of campaign funds. The rest of this analysis is void once the author fails to consider how badly democracy can be damaged once election regulations are not respected.
Of course, the author may jave ulterior motives, and wants to defend Le Pen in this case because he wants to see democracy in Europe weakened from within. But I sm giving the benefit of doubt here and presuming stupidity rather than malice.
But voters would decide how much the embezzlement continued to matter, after she had already served time and paid a large fine. That would be the actual democratic outcome. Letting the people choose, as opposed to taking away their choice.
You, on the other hand, are presenting Marine Le Pen as a threat to democracy, presumably because you don't like the far right. But you're just one voter. Why not trust the electorate? Voters chose Giorgia Meloni and I don't see Italian democracy falling apart.
I'm not far right at all. I'm not even right. But I worry it's dangerous and will backfire to take choice away from an electorate because of some misuse of funds (that didn't benefit herself financially) that she is already being heavily punished for at a personal level. She's being punished. Voters shouldn't be by taking away their right to choose.
Only when the rules are respected by everyone involved.
If we are playing football (or soccer for the barbarians across the pond), a core principle is to score goals. If in the middle of the game I punch you in the face, that principle stops mattering super fast.
> Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate?
Because that is how rules and regulations work. If you want them changed, change them properly, don't go breaking them because your pet right wing politician was punished for breaking them.
> There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office
I fundamentally disagree. The only thing anti-democratic is to allow someone that does not respect the democratic rules for running for office, for they will undermine democracy from within.
> The only thing anti-democratic is to allow someone that does not respect the democratic rules for running for office, for they will undermine democracy from within.
Surely you see the catch in this belief. If there is a group of people who can "allow" others to run for election then the system is not democratic at its core.
Or if the judiciary has any sort of bias as is implied in this case. (I don't pretend to know the details)
I enthusiastically endorse the separation of powers and firmly believe that people should follow systems, not people. Perhaps it just a global coincidence, but the recent spate of candidate disqualification (US, Romania, Turkey, France) gives the appearance of democratic decay.
> Or if the judiciary has any sort of bias as is implied in this case. (I don't pretend to know the details)
Then don't assume the judiciary is biased by following up with a disclaim that you are repeating baseless conjecture. Le Pen was judged with her right to legal defense, found guity, and punished accordingly. This is democracy working as it should.
> I enthusiastically endorse the separation of powers and firmly believe that people should follow systems, not people.
Based on the content of your posts, I sincerely doubt your enthusiastic endorsement.
You are very quick to make excuses for the right wing politician that was punished for embezzlement, claimed repeatedly that her being banned from office is undemocratic, and claimed without a shred of evidence that the court that judged her is biased.
Forgive me if I think you are bullshitting me here.
> Perhaps it just a global coincidence, but the recent spate of candidate disqualification (US, Romania, Turkey, France) gives the appearance of democratic decay.
Comparing France to Turkey is pure bad faith argumentation. If you genuinely think that Turkey and France share any sort of democratic decay you are very ill informed.
If Le Pen was not punished, I would agree France was taking a step in creating its own French Erdogan.
You must be confusing my posts with someone else. Or claim doesn't mean what you think it means. Forgive me if it's difficult to forgive you when you place so much negative spin on what I wrote.
Only if those people act in anti-democratic ways. E.g. if they apply the law selectively, if they forego or restrict due process, and if they play around with the meaning of words and crimes then yeah, that's anti-democratic. For example, people brought up what's happening in Turkey, and I agree what's happening there is anti-democratic.
But if the people involved are not making up crimes, but prosecuting crimes; if they are not targeting people specifically, but enforcing the law that applies to everyone; and if they are allowing for the maximum possible due process, then there really isn't much of a case for that process being anti-democratic.
> There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office.
i’m curious, do you think age minimums are ok? i feel like with this opinion have to throw out all restrictions on the ability to run for office to be consistent.
You're acting like computers, or neutral actors external to the political system, decide "when rules are broken" and what "punishment" to apply.
That's entirely the wrong way to think about government. Government isn't about rules, it's about allocation of power. You have to think about government in terms of who is entrusted with power to make which decisions. If you entrust judges and lawyers to decide "when rules are broken" by elected officials, you give them power over those officials, and over voters.
Now that's okay to a degree, but the question is: where does the buck stop? If you design a system where the buck stops with lawyers and judges, then you've effectively given those lawyers and judges power to overrule voters. It's better to design a system where the lawyers and judges demur in situations like this, to avoid a "tail wagging the dog" situation where the legal system is invoked to resolve a political dispute.
You seem to have failed to see the thorniness of the problem maybe because in the current instance (Le Pen's ban by the French judiciary) you agree with the outcome.
Probably impossible to separate Le Pen's disqualification from the situation in the U.S. It's the song of the day. I seem to recall some account arguing in 2020, nominally on their expertise as a lawyer, that the election result could not be determined except in the courtroom. If you asked in 2020, should lawyers be disgraced if not disbarred for attempting to nullify the election - answer from GOP would be no. When asked today, suddenly answer is yes.
I agree only in the sense that K think that politicians should be punished for their wrongs.
I would only see thorniness is the courts refused to punish Le Pen out of fear of punishing a somewhat popular politician, as this would embolden others to act in ways to break the rules, and would undermine the independence of the court, which is a core tenet of a functioning democracy.
I think you only see thorniness here because you wanted Le Pen to keep doing her thing. See? it works both ways.
That's why we have nowadays Republics, with either written constitutions or fundamental legal texts like Habeas Corpus, not just pure democracies à la antique Athens.
The way out of your conundrum is to admit there is no "the People"; there is a collection of diverging, often incoherent trends, and no voting system is perfect (no voting system is even logical, as proven by Condorcet and Arrow[0])
Arrow is not at all "procedural", the French know it well: the 1995 presidential election ended with a Chirac vs Le Pen (the patriarch) duel, even though Lionel Jospin was the favorite and would have beaten both if he had faced them off... A clear example of non-transitivity in elections.
That's my point, sorry if it wasn't clear. Non-transitivity is resolved procedurally. We can theorize about Arrow all we want; in the meantime we can write rules that actually do produce electoral results.
My point is that it wasn't resolved: Jospin was the favorite, but the French were forced to choose between two candidates the majority of them loathed. The rules were a failure.
The definition of democracy according to Ricœur is:
> Est démocratique, une société qui se reconnaît divisée, c’est-à-dire traversée par des contradictions d’intérêt et qui se fixe comme modalité, d’associer à parts égales, chaque citoyen dans l’expression de ces contradictions, l’analyse de ces contradictions et la mise en délibération de ces contradictions, en vue d’arriver à un arbitrage.
In English, more-or-less:
> A society is democratic if it acknowledge that it is divided, which means that it contains contradictory interests, and if it creates modality to analyse and debate these contradictions so that we can reach arbitration, with each citizen having an equal share in the debate.
I don't believe that a society is democratic if a majority of the people have decided something that is harmful or unfair to a minority without properly having debated if this decision is fair or not for the minority.
Because of that, no, it's not "whatever the majority decides". In a democracy, the will to guarantee justice and fairness is more important than "the people", and if they say "there is suspicion of fraud from this candidate but let's just close our eyes because we like this person or because it is profitable for us", this is clearly a behavior where they are not trying to reach a just and fair situation.
This is what distinguish democracy from ochlocracy.
And I don't understand how people can really defend that we should ignore the justice/fairness condition: what is the point of following "the people" when these people are not trying to be just and fair? How will it be a good society?
> For democracy to work properly politicians need to follow the rules.
Democracy doesn't require that, except for a narrow subset of rules relating to voting and things like that.
The system you're describing isn't even democracy--it elevates lawyers and judges above the voters. Think about it: if there was a class of people you could trust to neutrally administer and enforce "the rules" then you wouldn't need multiple branches of government, separation of powers, etc. You could just make rules for everything, and trust the neutral arbiters to enforce those rules in politically neutral ways.
Here's one: Jacques Chirac was condemned in 2011 to 2 years with suspension (so, less than Le Pen) for something very similar (party members paid for fictitious jobs at the Mairie de Paris when he was mayor), and no ineligibility (so again, different consequences).
So it sounds like other politicians have indeed been convicted of similar things. The difference in punishment would then require you to examine the difference in the severity of the actions, which is beyond my pay grade.
> It seems that the system does work as intended after all.
Does it though? One common thread in the comments here is whether ineligibility is or is not warranted in political embezzlement cases. If hers is justified, how is the lack of Chirac's justified? That he was not seeking to be elected?
Whether or not it's actually a politically motivated difference, it's not a stretch that people question whether it is. Because it's a very convenient sentence. And let's face it, she was very likely to make it to the second round of the presidential election, and I can totally see a number of people being extremely bothered that it was a possibility, because if it did happen, if she wouldn't have won, it would have been very close (although who knows, a miracle could happen, and the political field might be less of a mess in 2 years).
> If hers is justified, how is the lack of Chirac's justified? That he was not seeking to be elected?
As stated in another reply, being sentenced to ineligibility for embezzlement is only possible since 2017.
It simply wasn’t a possible sentence in 2011. Note that this is not because it was considered too harsh. Ineligibility was systematic before 2010 as anyone condemned for embezzlement was automatically removed from voting lists for five years. However this was judged unconstitutional in 2010 (because it was automatic and sentences have to be individualised, ineligibility in itself is fully constitutional).
I think you're wrong here. A law can't be applied retroactively except if it would benefit the defendant and the RN case is about facts that happened before 2017.
Chirac's case happened more than 3 decades ago. Perhaps the judiciary had a different understanding on the gravity of those crimes back then. Perhaps what Le Pen did was more serious.
If Le Pen won, or if she would make to the second round is meaningless. The election would be tainted by having her running. That people are burthurt that their pet right wing populist became ineligible is of no substance. If anything it proves the courts are independent, and not acting to please a subset of the people.
Unsurprising. The laws making ineligibility a sanction for embezzlement, “Lois pour la confiance dans la vie politique”, is from 2017.
Note also that the 2011 verdict was somewhat unusual because before 2010 when this was judged unconstitutional, Chirac condemnation would have led to him being removed from the voting list for five years and therefore de facto ineligible. Chirac was “lucky” to be sentenced during the seven years window when ineligibility wasn’t possible.
I mean, "trust the electorate" sounds like a nice ideal, but I think it conveniently ignores the shithose of news and information that makes its way into the public discourse. We can't agree on basic facts in most places. What hope do we have to "trust the electorate" when most people are given straight propaganda and they buy it whole cloth.
If you want to live in the world where we "trust the electorate" you first have to figure out how to make the electorate informed. In the meantime, I would gladly accept equally applied and adjudicated laws as a way to remove corrupt individuals from the electable population. A lot of places do this already, so making it so someone can't run for a given election cycle seems like a relatively small slap on the wrist compared to barring felons from ever being allowed to vote or hold office.
They applied a law against corruption for which Le Pen herself voted. At some point, you need to trust the laws that elected members of parliament have enacted and also apply it to politicians.
At some level, yes. At the level of letting convicted criminals run for the highest office, no, that would be stupid.
> it should be easy to make that case to the electorate
It turns out if you have enough money for endless propaganda it is easy to make any case to the electorate. And who will be making the case anyway? The state cannot because it has to be inpartial in the elections; their opponents have a clear agenda (they want to be the president) so it's easy to dismiss their case.
So that leaves no one with standing.
> If it's not that easy, then banning her from running is even worse.
If the result is that a convicted criminal will not be elected into the highest office of the state, that's not a worse outcome, that's a perfect outcome.
Allowing some people to be above the law is a bad idea in general. Selecting elected officials to be above the law in particularly is ill-thought-out, IMO. Perverse incentives abound . Elections shouldn't be a get-out-of-jail card.
> The official position appears to be that a political party is given money by the EU but can only use it if they're pro-EU. A party that wishes the EU to be smaller or for their country to exit is then considered to be engaged in "national" politics rather than "European" politics, which makes their spending the money they were given as a political party, to do politics, "embezzlement".
No need for the scary quotation marks. This was plain embezzlement, as you very aptly described.
> Yes, but it is bad for democracy if only one specific viewpoint, the viewpoint of the people in charge no less, is actively sponsored via taxes.
And that is not what is happening. You can hold quite a lot of viewpoints, including opposing who is in charge. You just can't use EU funds to campaign for EU to be effectively abolished.
Imagine someone running for presidency in the US campaigning for it to disintegrate.
> Sorry, but you are representing the “a dark path”, where power is concentrated in the hands of a few.
Quite the opposite. EU fragments power so much that fucking Orban gets to block any initiative, even though Hungary is far from being one of the main countries in the block.
Also, very cute of you to cry authoritarianism when we are talking about Le Pen of all people, someone who holds very authoritarian views herself. Quite telling, whenever such a politician faces consequences of their bullshit, a lot of people come out of the woods to make excuses for them. Fuck that noise.
And why shouldn’t you be able to use EU funds for that? It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if a political organisation that is pro EU gets funding, the opponents should be funded as well. What is beneficial to the EU as a organisation shouldn’t be a parameter at all, that’s not how democracy works.
I agree that Marie Le Pen holds authoritarian views. When it comes to politicians this seems to be the rule rather than an exception. But that doesn’t make EU a particularly democratic organisation.
In my opinion, it is rare to find politicians who try to increase democracy.
Regarding your USA example, I believe it is only a nominally democratic state. I don’t think what they do over there is particularly good and should not be wused as a positive example.
I believe the best example of a functioning democracy is Switzerland.
> And why shouldn’t you be able to use EU funds for that? It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if a political organisation that is pro EU gets funding, the opponents should be funded as well. What is beneficial to the EU as a organisation shouldn’t be a parameter at all, that’s not how democracy works.
I fundamentally disagree with that. It would be like using public funds to run for presidency in a country while campaigning for that country to cease to exist.
Note that they didn't forbid her to campaign on a platform that is against the EU - which I think they should - they only forbid her to use public EU funds to do so.
That you want to paint this as undemocratic is very bizarre.
> But that doesn’t make EU a particularly democratic organisation.
To the opposite, EU fragments power quite a lot. It is one of the main reasons why it is slow to act sometimes, many changes requires unanimous approval from all member countries (which is why Orban gets to veto any initiative while he is gurgling on Putin's balls).
> In my opinion, it is rare to find politicians who try to increase democracy.
I don't even know if we would agree what a perfectly functioning democracy even is.
> It would be like using public funds to run for presidency in a country while campaigning for that country to cease to exist.
You seem to think this is an absurd scenario - I don't know how to tell you this, but it's not. It's allowed in healthy democracies. To give just three contemporary European examples:
1. In the UK the Scottish National Party gets public money for being in Parliament, yet has the stated goal that the UK should cease to exist. SNP MPs aren't thrown in prison or banned from politics. That's because the UK is a democracy.
2. Flanders has independence parties that poll highly and take part in regular politics without being banned from Belgian politics.
3. MEPs themselves are frequently arch Euro-nationalists. They get public money and then campaign to effectively abolish the countries they represent, demanding their national governments be replaced by the EU institutions. This is of course not considered illegal.
Whilst there are regions that criminalize attempts to actually become independent (which they shouldn't), even they typically don't criminalize merely being in favor of it.
> Note that they didn't forbid her to campaign on a platform that is against the EU - which I think they should - they only forbid her to use public EU funds to do so.
She's been banned from politics entirely and given a prison sentence. That meets the threshold for something being forbidden.
It honestly sounds like you'd have been happy with all the other attempts to unite Europe under a single government that happened in the 20th century. Not only are you delighted by this clearly despotic move, you think it should be illegal to even be against the EU at all: a purist argument for the EU as totalitarian dictatorship. You should really think about whether that's the place you want to be, philosophically. Especially as frustration over the EU's undemocratic approach was the primary reason the UK left.
> 1. In the UK the Scottish National Party gets public money for being in Parliament, yet has the stated goal that the UK should cease to exist. SNP MPs aren't thrown in prison or banned from politics. That's because the UK is a democracy.
SNP is a very particular case in that Scotland is a country, and the UK is a country made up of countries.
Also, Scotland is not trying to abolish the UK, it would still be a United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Northen Ireland.
> 2. 2. Flanders has independence parties that poll highly and take part in regular politics without being banned from Belgian politics.
Again, you are speaking of a portion of a country that desires independence. This is not the same as abolishing the country. Belgium would not cease to exist.
I could bring up movements that desire the separation of Catalonia and Basque Country in Spain too.
> 3. MEPs themselves are frequently arch Euro-nationalists. They get public money and then campaign to effectively abolish the countries they represent, demanding their national governments be replaced by the EU institutions. This is of course not considered illegal.
Replacing national institutions with more EU integration is not trying to abolish the existence of that country. You are extrapolating something there in a weird slippery slope.
> She's been banned from politics entirely and given a prison sentence. That meets the threshold for something being forbidden.
Perhaps she should not have engaged in embezzlement. Good that she was banished. It is important to respect the rules in place, else they become irrelevant and more politicians would feel emboldened to break them.
> It honestly sounds like you'd have been happy with all the other attempts to unite Europe under a single government that happened in the 20th century.
Nice way to try to paint me as a Nazi while you are crying about Le Pen of all people.
Protip, I am not the Nazi in this conversation.
> Not only are you delighted by this clearly despotic move, you think it should be illegal to even be against the EU at all: a purist argument for the EU as totalitarian dictatorship.
EU is far from being totalitarian, and far from being a dictatorship. If it was we wouldn't have to handle Orban being a pain in the ass for every initiative.
In fact, it is so democratic that things move slooooowly, because it needs a lot of consensus for things to move forward. It's a price I agree to pay, even if Orban is the cost for it.
> You should really think about whether that's the place you want to be, philosophically.
I am very much in favor of more EU integration, and I certainly vote for pro EU politiciand and parties for that matter. EU federalization should be the goal for me.
> Especially as frustration over the EU's undemocratic approach was the primary reason the UK left.
There have been other cases like this one yes, the EU fined UKIP for the same reason iirc. UKIP of course was a party that had only one policy: getting Britain out of the EU. Therefore any political activity by them was considered illegal under this policy.
In other cases the same things have been done without fines, I think, e.g. the German Greens. Because their policies align with the Commission their campaigning in Germany isn't considered "embezzlement".
The basic issue the EU has is that the Parliament isn't actually a Parliament. It's not genuinely the legislative branch because it can't change the law, which is the dictionary definition of Parliament. As a consequence it fills up with anti EU parties put there as a protest vote. These parties then want to spend their time advocating against the EU back home which is embarrassing to the EU as there is no other so-called Parliament in the world with so many members who think it shouldn't exist. These kinds of legal actions were conventionally about that.
This one has gone further because it's a way for the left to continue locking down mass immigration policies. Although you will read that Le Pen is far right in reality she is a classical left wing socialist with the policies typical of such a person, she is just against the EU and its migration policies. It's a purely ideological action, hence the ankle bracelet.
> This one has gone further because it's a way for the left to continue locking down mass immigration policies. Although you will read that Le Pen is far right in reality she is a classical left wing socialist with the policies typical of such a person, she is just against the EU and its migration policies. It's a purely ideological action, hence the ankle bracelet.
You are absolutely delusional.
This is on the same ballpark of the argument some brain damaged people repeat that the NSDAP was leftist because it had "socialist" in the party name.
> That post was for the Americans who are waking up about now.
You are just trying to excuse a plain case of embezzlement by dressing up as authoritarianism. Good that a cheater such as Le Pen is removed from elections. If democracy allows cheaters to run, that is shortcut to disaster.
Were Le Pen able to win an election without embezzlement of EU funds, I would agree she is as popular as you claim.
> And to the people who call themselves "European citizens", I would say this: you can build a positive, shared European identity without the EU.
As someone that lives in an EU country, I fully disagree. Even the largest EU countries are relatively small for the world stage. Consider that Germany has the population of Chinese provinces.
EU is an absurdly positive to every country involved, to the point where I actively desire further integration. Federalization of Europe should be the goal, not less integration.
> The average rock concert does more for long term European integration than any EU regulation because the EU is not Europe and Europe is not the EU. The EU is a transient political arrangement, one that is by now actually working against true European integration.
And this is the point where I come to conclusion you are arguing in bad faith.
> The path it's on leads to ever harsher authoritarianism.
Funny you mention this when you are crying about Le Pen and fucking AfD.
Yeah, nothing authoritarian from those people. It is the EU that is truly authoritarian. Sure.
It's hardly a condemnation... They reiterated that they consider the accusations to be very serious, and are not casting doubt or whether the decision is unjust. They do emit doubts about the timing of it, but for political gains.
Mélenchon's strategy has been for a while to get voters from both the ghettos and from Le Pen's pool of supposedly unhappy but not racist voters. That's again what they're doing here: painting themselves as more respectable [0] than the far right while shitting on Macron / the current establishment.
[0] As opposed to the far right, their ranks aren't filled with people who have been convicted for antisemitism, and the sheer amount of fraud cases in there also speaks for itself...
Yes, but it's not as if Le Pen has been nominated and there is a week until the election. If 'bad timing' is any time in the 5 years before, the term becomes meaningless.
They STOLE 4 millions for f-sake ! AND it's not even the first time; they got away easy until this time.
They also have been frothing hard for decades about the leniency of the courts and how utterly honest they were compared to the others ... I guess its only relevant as long as they're not concerned. Incredible.
Personally, I believe that in a democracy, courts shouldn’t have the power to disqualify individuals from running for office. That’s just my opinion, though, and I’m not familiar with the situation in France.
Separately, here in the U.S., I take issue with the fact that ex-felons are denied the right to vote. I believe we should push for a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to vote for every U.S. citizen—regardless of their criminal record or other issues.
If it's been proven that a politician will cheat democracy, how is banning them from running for office a bad thing? And who should decide that if not the courts?
How would that be any different than banning someone from running a company after they've been found guilty of fraud or any other way of breaking the law about how to run companies?
If they've been proven unable to follow the law, they shouldn't be able to be elected.
As some extra context here, the judge mentioned that she was totally recognizing how heavy the situation was. But she mentioned a few things:
- it's been found that it was all part of a system designed from the very top of the party (so MLP) to embezzle money
- it's been noted that during the entire procedure, all the defendants showed complete denial of the facts and no will to accept that they did something bad
As such she pointed out that they was a high risk that they would do it again, and that's what tipped the scale in favor of banning them right away. I agree with that.
My concern is that courts can become corrupted or influenced by those in power, which creates a serious problem. While courts should have the authority to issue sentences—like prison terms—they shouldn’t be the ones deciding who the public is allowed to vote for.
If people want to vote for someone, that’s their democratic right. And if they make a mistake, they’ll learn from the consequences. But the decision should ultimately rest with the voters, not the courts.
All I have seen is that four people worked for the party while being paid by the EU. Nothing like routing money to advertising campaigns or anything that would actually swing an election. And the headlines are all about embezzlement, not election fraud. So this seems like a stretch.
I read that 9 European representatives, plus 12 assistants, plus 4 other members of the party were found guilty as part of a scheme to earn illegally EUR 2.9M for the party.
Say the person who the public vote for is in prison (and to make it "easier", prior to running for office. Or maybe they were a write-in).
That decision should lie with the voters, you say.
So which takes precedence? Prison, where they are serving a sentence? Or the democratic role?
After all, the same public, using their democratic rights, voted for a system in which that person was sentenced to prison.
So which vote is more important? The vote that says that "X is a crime, and if you are justly convicted, the sentence is Y"? Or the vote that says "If I want you to be our leader, that's more important than that previous application of justice"?
"If they've been proven unable to follow the law, they shouldn't be able to be elected."
Because it gives incumbents a strong incentive to try influencing the courts against their opponents.
I believe - yes, it is my opinion only - that existence of such incentives and a temptation to act upon them is, in the long run, more dangerous to democracy than allowing felons into elections.
People respond to incentives. If we know anything at all about human behavior, it is that people respond to incentives. And there is no shiny nice wall separating democracies from authoritarian states. Countries slide along the scale, and they can absolutely slide in the wrong direction.
I come from a former Communist country and the far left in power twisted justice beyond any recognition. We had the "pleasure" being occupied by the Nazis and then ruled by the Stalinists and the bothside-ism is absolutely spot on, because these two systems are like evil brothers.
And as for France, that is why I don't trust Mélenchon any more than Le Pen, and they have 50 per cent of voters between them. Two far-somethings don't make a democracy.
Judges sitting in those courts are not politicians elected to take decisions weighted by how their constituents will like them and reelect them, but people who've studied law and its application (unlike politicians who can be anyone), who have been vetted by peers for their capacity to be law "technicians", and whose job is to "apply" the law, whether they disagree with it or not.
That's the concept of the separation of powers. Of course judges will have opinions and can never truly be objective (no such thing exists anyway), but their main job is to apply the law. And the concept of appeal and (in France) "cassation", which meana judgment can be revised up to two times, are there so that no single judge ruling can be definitive in isolation.
If politicians can use the judicial system to ban political opponents, the system is broken and powers are not separated in the right way. And I'll definitely not say that France has a perfect separation (the president concentrate a lot more than it should), but it's still there and this wasn't such a case (in the past two years, Le Pen and the RN is the group that Macron has been willingly compromising with and letting arbitrate a lot of stuff)
There is no final arbitrator that is above all others.
Liberal democracies are build on the principle that no institution is beyond corruption. That's why they build systems based on separation of powers and checks and balances.
(1) Courts should be independent, because executive branch can be corrupt and law-making branch (voters and their representatives) don't always want to follow the laws they set up.
(2) Law making branch (elections, representatives) should be immune from courts and executive branch messing with them. Lawmakers have immunity from courts and executive. Courts and executive branch should not be able to limit candidates too much.
(3) Executive branch should execute laws, but not allowed to make them. Courts should keep the executive branch in check and have at least some immunity form it.
It's all balancing acts. Different countries have different balances.
> And who should decide that if not the courts?
We could trust voters to take that into the account when making decision who to vote.
> Liberal democracies are build on the principle that no institution is beyond corruption.
It's an ontological issue, if everyone is potentially compromised, how do you know anything ? It's also leveraged by biased medias to discredit old institutions and suddenly no more counter powers..
It's the pragmatic acknowledgment that human fallibility necessitated institutional safeguards against the concentration of power. Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu, came up with it.
I don't have a strong opinion on it wither way, but the GP's opinion seems totally reasonable to me.
Why shouldn't the public be able to elect whoever they want? If the courts can block candidates before they run, the courts can effectively circumvent checks and balances before the person could be elected.
> Didn't history teach us better?
I'm not sure what you're referring to here, help me out. What examples of history show the universal downsides when courts can't disqualify potential candidates?
>Why shouldn't the public be able to elect whoever they want?
Because some types of illegal behaviour of candidates can influence the vote.
This isn't about a court banning MLP because of her views or policy proposals (that would be very bad) but because she has been show to have comitted fraud by abusing EU money to pay for her own party.
Unlike in the US there are strict rules in France about how much politicians can spend on campainging and where the funds can come from that are intended to ensure a level playing field rather than favouring rich candidates.
If courts couldn't ban candidates who don't respect the rules then elections could be "bought" illegaly.
Sure, I'm not attempting to comment specifically on French laws, I don't know French laws nearly well enough.
The comment I relied to was talking about judicial powers in general, and referenced the US rather than France.
My point really isn't specific to any one country though. If an electoral system is meant to be democratic, IMO people should be able to vote for whomever they want. If a candidate can get enough support to win, so be it.
That doesn't preclude us from having laws protecting our right to free and fair elections though. A candidate will absolutely influence the vote, that's the candidate's whole job. There has to be lines drawn where it goes from campaigning to impeding a democratic election, I wasn't arguing against that.
>> Why would you want that? Didn't history teach us better?
Once you give the courts the power to disqualify candidates you open the door to massive potential for political witch hunts with the express goal of disqualifying the opposition.
Since the executive branch effectively controls the justice department, this is a pretty scary thought.
It is the same in France, the courts are independent in principle, while prosecutors remain under executive control but since 2013 they should not give orders on individual cases.
France has an additional layer of independence compared to the U.S. because of the juge d’instruction (investigating judge), who is also supposed to be independent from the executive, unlike prosecutors.
I say in principle because, judges are appointed in France and not elected. The executive as some control through appointments and career advancements but they are not supposed to use it to sanction or reward the judges.
The effectiveness of these independence mechanisms remains a subject of active debate, as evidenced by the relatively recent changes made to them.
I've always been of the opinion that a power shouldn't be granted if it can be abused so easily.
Its unreasonable to say powers should never be abusable, but it isn't hard for a political system to become politicized. That shouldn't be all it takes.
That's the thing about the nature of power -- it's not really power if it can't be easily abused. That's why with great power, comes great responsibility. Responsibility would not be needed if the power couldn't be abused.
At the end of the day if someone has the ability to prevent you from using your power, they are the ones who actually have power. So who watches the watchmen?
The US tries to solve this conundrum by making the checks on power a self-reinforcing circle. "Checks and balances". But at the end of the day, the Constitution is just a piece of paper, and all it takes to abuse power once given to you is to convince yourself you have the right.
We can diffuse the power so much that not one person can abuse it. But that has the problem of making action so impossible that the power is never used and nothing gets done. Equally problematic.
That's why it's so important to elect people of high character. Most politicians fail this test.
I think we agree here in general. For me the risk is too high when only one person can abuse power in a meaningful way with little or no check on that authority. I put most executive branch powers (in the US) on that list - the president was meant to largely be a figurehead only executing on what the legislative branch passed and the courts haven't found unconstitutional.
> That's why it's so important to elect people of high character. Most politicians fail this test.
I'd say we have failed to build a system that incentivizes anyone of high character to run for office.
The exchange of power, including consolidation and fragmentation of power, is politics.
Courts give orders, but the coercive powers of fines and incarceration are administrative. At the federal level, and the few states I'm familiar with, these are executive branch powers.
To whatever degree the founders were deeply flawed people, they understood power quite well. They didn't create a democracy as much as they created a polyarchy. Their interest was to make ambitions compete. Ambition to counter ambition.
They were most concerned by consolidated power. Monarchy. For obvious reasons.
"Politicization" is just politics, which is nothing more than how human interact when it comes to gaining power.
Your problem is with human nature - it's not going to change.
We'll never have a system where we find "good humans" who don't have the urge to win by any means necessary. So you need to devise a system that makes that as hard as possible.
The problem is tying this to the category of felony, which is too broad of a category.
Someone who committed something heinous like felony assault, there’s still an easy argument to be made that they should be allowed to both run for office and vote.
But if someone was guilty of some kind of corruption, bribery, taking bribes, spying, insurrection, treason, organized crime, violating their oath of office, or anything else that suggests they are not going to serve with the best interests of their constituents and the world at heart, they should absolutely not be allowed to run for office, and maybe should not be allowed to vote.
This is Separation of Power Issue and not a clear cut issue. The principle is that Law, Law-making, and executive-power should be separated.
It's really who you trust more: courts or the people.
1. French law recognizes that French people are not trusted to weigh in the conviction properly, and the court sentences put limits to how can and can't run.
2. On the other hand, corrupting of the courts would prevent correcting the system by voting. If the courts are corrupt all hope is lost.
> 2. On the other hand, corrupting of the courts would prevent correcting the system by voting. If the courts are corrupt all hope is lost.
Just last week a turkish court arrested the mayor of Istanbul under similar "corruption" charges. He happens to be the most popular opposition politician challenging Erdogan.
EDIT: forgot to mention that recently Romanian supreme court canceled the elections altogether because the current government did not like the guy who won the first round. And of course he is not allowed to run in the rerun of the elections. People's votes do not seem to count any longer.
It's relevant that the corruption charges against Erdoğan's opponent are obviously trumped-up, whereas the ones against Le Pen are entirely legitimate.
Kinda, sometimes politicians gets elected, and tear down the courts who could say against them. Belarus was a democracy for a short time, until the future dictator ordered SWAT team to throw out members of parliament who wanted his impeachment. Then several of them disappeared forever, others got the message. And the democracy ended.
Donald Trump is in the process of doing this right now. Law firms that worked with the prosecution of many of his cases are being actively pressured. In some cases they are being banned from government owned buildings, banned from lists of law firms the federal government may hire and having security clearances revoked.
I think Democrats are doing a disservice by not pushing back harder against Trump’s attacks on judges and his calls for their impeachment. The judiciary is one of the few remaining institutions that can check executive overreach, and defending it should be a top priority.
More broadly, I believe Democrats would gain much more support if they focused on a few key issues—ones that have broad consensus and appeal to independents—and pursued them with laser focus. Instead, they tend to chase after every single distraction Trump throws their way, which only plays into his strategy.
There is separation of powers: The legislature made the law, the executive enforces it, the courts interpet it. The legislature is more responsible than the courts, IMHO.
The real responsible person is Marine Le Pen: Don't commit crimes and you won't have these problems.
The temporary loss of the right to stand for election is a common punishment in France when politicians are convicted of corruption and breach of trust.
I don't think anyone is questioning whether it's legal, simply whether it's right or ideologically consistent with people who claim to be pro-democracy.
Do you believe that non-citizens should be allowed to run for any office? Or that citizens living outside a state/district should be allowed to represent that state/distict? If not, courts and/or election officials must have the power to disqualify individuals. As long as there are any legal requirements for a candidate, someone must make the final decision on whether a potential candidate fulfills the requirements.
Good thing Florida exempted Trump from their "convicted felons can't vote" laws, too, huh?
Oh, it's Trump, they said, well, yes, he has been convicted, but because a sentence has not been imposed or completed he's akshualllly not reallly a felon... yet.
All the inmates in Florida prisons whose sentences have not been completed were very surprised to learn they were still eligible to vote.
If your crime is so heinous as to come with life-long punishment, you should be in prison for life. If the idea of putting someone in prison for life for a particular crime makes you take pause, perhaps they shouldn't have any life-long punishment for that crime. This includes all Constitutionally-protected rights: voting, gun rights, whatever one you want to pick.
Conversely, if there are so many prisoners or the disenfranchised that, in a democracy, they can sway elections and drive policy, isn't that a sign there's something wrong with the system, e.g. disenfranchisement and prison is being used as a weapon against parts of the population? Denying them the vote means the system is that much harder to fix.
On the other hand, if only those who really deserve it lose their right to vote (i.e. a small fraction of the population), then it doesn't really matter if they can vote or not - their small numbers mean they won't make a difference. But the benefit is that disenfranchisement can no longer be used as a political weapon.
You shouldn't be able to vote if you are actively in prison on the day of the election. Or maybe cases like house arrest. But if we say that you're able to be walking around in society with us, including probation/parole, you should have all the rights that others have.
It doesn't come with life-long punishment. She's banned from public office for five years (immediate), and jailed for four years (won't come into effect until after the appeal).
I'm just talking about felons in the US who have served their time in incarceration and finished parole/probation/supervised release being denied multiple rights for the rest of their lives.
In this case an appeal would normally suspend the verdict so the judge in effect specifically decided to prevent her from running for President by imposing immediate effect on a verdict that isn't final.
No doubt that this will only strengthen the claims that this is politically motivated, and the timing is obviously very "interesting"... So unclear how this will play out in public opinion and polls.
That's how democracy works in Europe: the courts are part of the checks and ballances, politicians have to be transparent about campaign financing so that we hopefully don't get Uncle Adolph running the show again, needing Allied intervention again and bombs dropped on innocent people and beer factories.
Le Pen's case is similar to Sarkozy takng a briefcase of cash from Gaddafi to finance hus campaign (and then waging war agsinst him) but it's more nuanced, because instead she used EU funds when Putin's funding dried up due to the need to finance his war. So basically she should probably be in the same place that Sarkozy is now or wherever the court will decide based on evidence.
There is a very real risk of political candidates committing political fraud, getting elected thanks to it, and putting pressure on the judiciary branch to lower their chances of getting arrested. We're seeing this exact process happen in real time in the US. Every modern country pretends that nobody is above the law and that bad people will get convicted and get sentences but in real life the government has power over this stuff.
Making ineligibility sentences immediate is a way to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen.
It's also a way for someone to make their own re-election (or the continued control of their party) easier by "putting pressure on the judiciary branch" as you said to find their opponent guilty.
Take the individual parties of today out of it. You don't want the party in power in the government to have the ability to decide who is allowed to run for office. If you actually want to live in a democracy and not just autocracy with your favored party in power, you want the people to decide who runs with as little government input as possible.
A judge saying someone is not allowed to run for office is objectively, by definition, anti-democratic.
> We're seeing this exact process happen in real time in the US.
Last I checked Rosie O'Donnell is only one stupid enough to imply that the latest presidential election was not completely above board.
I know that, I'm just saying that if you can "put pressure on the judiciary" (which is a ridiculous statement in most western countries but especially France) to find someone not guilty, you can certainly do it to find them guilty.
The information the jury hears in the US in criminal cases, especially high profile ones, is extremely tightly controlled. They're not in the room when lawyers are making evidentiary arguments to include or exclude evidence. I've served on a couple juries and the most high-stakes one carried potentially decades of jail time for the defendant. We were shuffled in and out of that room dozens of times each day for lawyers to make arguments about what we could or could not hear. Several of our questions during deliberation were answered with a section of the transcript and nothing more.
Well, it’s quite common in France, especially for the particular activities one was convicted of engaging in (barred from politics for embezzlement of political funds, not allowed to trade equities if convicted of insider trading, etc. ) and even more common if the convicted person shows defiance of the courts, lack of cooperation, etc.
Make no mistake: this is completely standard and of LePen’s own doing.
Anyone telling you otherwise is either at best completely ignorant of French jurisprudence and the factual details of the case, or, at worse, intentionally deceiving you.
While not versed in French law or their view of personal liberties, from an American lens, this seems fine. Barring running from public office could be reversible on appeal and that stipulation isn’t irreversible—you could run after the ban is reversed—, so it’s not depriving you of something significant enough that that should rise to a level of stricter scrutiny.
The prison sentence being suspended until appeals are exhausted also seems sane to me for a nonviolent crime.
So, overall, it seems reasonable. The ban on a run isn’t infringing on fundamental rights in a way that is permanent and there’s no deprivation of liberty until appeals are exhausted.
As long as it's not a death sentence (and we don't want those), all sentences should be immediate. If everything hinges on an (another) appeal, where does it end?
Not remotely a fan of Marine LePen or her politics, even if she's become more moderate in recent years, but this will make her a martyr and empower her.
She can spend the next five years campaigning on how the establishment is trying to shut her down. These judges love own goals, no one should be barred from running for office of a country they're a citizen of. To me, it feels like overreach of un-elected judges.
The Judges impose the punishment set out in the law; they don't make this stuff up.
The alternative is Judges letting people off just because they're politicians. That seems like an extremely poor precedent to set, those in political life should be held to higher standards.
I didn't say letting someone of, a crime has been committed and the person should be punished. But forbidding someone from running from office? I don't think that should be the power of the judiciary. That should be the power and responsibility of the electorate (to not vote for them).
You do understand that this is explicitly mandated by the law and only in special cases can this be lifted (and here the judge mentioned the lack of remorse or admission from the defendant was a deciding factor for this)?
Here is a reference for that: https://www.vie-publique.fr/questions-reponses/297965-inelig...
>> Trump should be allowed to run for a 3rd term right?
From the 25th Amendment:
"No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."
Trump might not be able to "be elected to the office of the President" again, but he could run as a temporary Vice President and then the President could resign, allowing Trump to serve another term, for example.
Of course the 12th Amendment says, "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States", but the 25th Amendment doesn't say a two-term President is ineligible to the office of President, it says he can't "be elected to the office of President".
The Supreme Court recently decided that a law prohibiting false statements did not prohibit misleading statements. If the legislators had wanted to prohibit misleading statements, they would have prohibited false and misleading statements, not just false ones. Words matter to them.
And there are many other possibilities for creative types.
As far as the French eligibility rules go, would you be comfortable with a system where anyone who Trump's DOJ can get a conviction on is ineligible to run for office, with no right of appeal on that holding? That would be a really terrible incentive.
Not only Trump. Without the rules, Musk or Putin could run as well, the latter even work-from-home style. Also, if justice being blind is so bad before an election, why not after? Figuring out who won shouldn't involve any courts either. The public will just need to figure out who really won for themselves!
The US Supreme Court and Congress decided to allow Donald Trump to run in 2024, choosing not to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against him. As you can see today, this resulted in Donald Trump not being empowered.
Can't someone else run as a stand-in? Are voters so stupid that the stand-in would poll worse than Le Pen despite her party's victim advantage?
Disclaimer: I don't support Le Pen. I also don't support banning her from running, but it's harder for me to understand and argue why I feel that way. I think it's a combination of:
- If people would elect a "bad" leader, disqualifying them delays the problem. They'll eventually elect another bad leader or revolt. Unless the bad candidate is only popular for a temporary reason, but that may not always be the case.
- Disqualifying someone because they broke a law is bad, because anyone can be "breaking a law"; every nation has many laws and they can be misinterpreted. Related: the situation in Turkey.
- Counterpoint: a self-interested party will disqualify whoever they want. But written laws (even guidelines) matter in the long-term because borderline party-supporters need justification to stay supportive, and people revert to laws. See: countries (like Turkey and Russia) using laws to justify banning candidates instead of "because we said so".
Keeping the rules simple (e.g. "anyone can run for office, whoever gets the most votes wins") makes it harder for an adversary to break them while retaining support. Keeping Democracy makes it more likely that an "adversary" will lose power, because such parties tend to become unpopular. If Democracy leads to a "bad" party consistently winning, why have it?
In fact, maybe it's necessary for a Democracy to have a "really bad" candidate win every once in a while, so people know what is bad. Then, the approach people should take is to ensure that the leader can't make rapid, far-reaching changes, so they can't ruin Democracy or people's lives in a single term. Just far-reaching enough for people to realize they made a mistake; then regular elections should be frequent, or there should be a quick way to get a snap election, so the bad leader is replaced.
She allowed the law to pass by not voting against. There was enough abstention for her voice to matter.
She stole money from the EU, an act she did after being voted MP. She couldn’t have done it if she had not been elected. So, basically she was elected, stole money and she still should not be barred from the next presidential election after she allowed that ban law to be voted?
She chose the path, she should face the consequences.
While yes, this is happening to someone many really don't like, the optics of this look very bad. And, for those who dislike this particular politician who might be celebrating now, this is much more so bad news than it is good news.
At the end of the day, when we select our leaders to represent us, we seem to have forgotten that a big part of it should be about about the ethics, principles, character, and judgement of the individual.
If someone on "my side" was found guilty of embezzlement or fraud -- through due process in a court of law with sufficient evidence that there was no path of appeal -- then I have ZERO problems denouncing the individual and would celebrate their punishment.
This is the fundamental problem with the left in the US: the standards for ethics, principles, judgement, and character are simply higher and the left will more readily fault candidates for even small lapses while the right has no such qualms.
The whole 34 felony thing is not the one and only thing that cost the dems the election, but it's one of the major things. That, and the fine people hoax. They managed to float that one for a while. But: what goes up, must come down.
Really don't like this. It's smacks of corruption. I don't really care for Le Pen, she's not a good candidate, but the court should not be allowed to suspend someone from running for office. That's the voters job.
As a French person, I can say that this situation will unfold the same way as it did for Trump.
Jordan Bardella is going to take her place and most likely win in 2027. He is well liked by people, he is young and he doesn't have a political legacy. In some polls, they floated his name as a replacement if she was unable to run and he polled 10% + ahead of all his rivals in the first round giving him a very good chance to actually win the run off.
This is exactly how Macron won in 2017 (no political baggage, young) and despite his vows to crush the far right he never managed to do it. Even worse, the far right is far stronger now than it was 8 years ago.
The justice system gave the far right a martyr and that is something that they will use for campaigning.
> Jordan Bardella is going to take her place and most likely win in 2027. He is well liked by people, he is young and he doesn't have a political legacy.
Considering Bardella past debating performance, this seems highly unlikely to me. The RN always polls high when they can stay silent and represent an easy way to express opposition. Sadly, this doesn’t remain possible during the presidential election where they actually have to defend a program.
Bardella will most likely be skewered alive by any competent opponent if he is the appointed candidate and manages to pass the first round (two big if).
1) He led and won the EU elections by a wide margin.
2) Debates are no longer what tips the scale in the elections. Losing a debate is no longer the disqualifier that it once was. See the EU elections where the debates were terrible and not just because of Bardella.
3) This is a new world and Bardella is very good at campaigning on social media and has a very good reach with young people. Other parties besides LFI struggle to talk to people in general.
4) The RN is pretty much leading in all social categories except for retired people who so far had stuck with Macron. That will change as France is bleeding out and needs cash and the current government is going to get it where it can, including from it's most fervent admirers, retired people.
5) Marine Le Pen being sidelined is actually a blessing in disguise. She has worked hard to change the name of the party, change it's image, change it's people, in order to make it more likeable and more modern and by all account she has succeeded.
But there was one thing that always stuck, her name, which represent the past, when her dad ran the party.
Now that she is out, the RN can embrace being "Le Pen" free and some people who did not want to vote for her on principle because of her family history could very well be inclined to support a young, fresh face with 0 political baggage/scandal.
She is the sacrificial lamb, thrown to the wolves and in public they will lament it everywhere but come election time, her name will not be on any pamphlets and the final transformation phase of the party will be completed.
6) TINA (There is no alternative) The French political landscape is frozen in time with the same people doing the same race every 5 years.
The right wing party is basically an appendage to Macron's party at this point, the Socialists are decimated, the other left wing parties will not unite behind JLM due to his controversial views.
The center is going to be split by a civil war in order to decide who will inherit Macron's party as well as his legacy but whoever wins will also inherit the label "more of the same" which sunk Kamala Harris in the US.
Zemmour is now seen as the troublemaker and stands no chance of winning so his supporters will most likely vote for Bardella in the run off.
Bardella is the new kid on the block who will run for the first time and that will generate a lot of buzz, just like when Eric Zemmour ran in 2022.
If we add the votes from all the "far right" parties: RN + Reconquete + NPA, their total is above 40% in the first round according to the latest polls, which is the highest it has ever been.
> The RN always polls high when they can stay silent and represent an easy way to express opposition.
I don't agree with the staying silent part. I think people know by now what the party represents. Less legal and illegal immigration, tougher on crime, better salaries, and so on as it has always been. That is why people vote for them. The rest is small potatoes in comparison.
> Bardella will most likely be skewered alive by any competent opponent
That remains to be seen. Macron won in 2017 just the same. He was not a politician, not a very good debater either and his political stance was murky at best. See the "Yes I am a socialist" bit on TV followed by another bit a while later "No, I am not a socialist"
Novelty can be a good thing and I think the French people are ready for a change. But I guess we will know in two years from now.
Please note that I am expressing my personal views on this issue based on what I have seen and heard from relatives living in France. I personally don't support any of the mainstream candidates so I don't really care who wins or loses.
All of this is highly debatable obviously and I’m not an oracle but find after my replies to your point.
> He led and won the EU elections by a wide margin.
Can’t be compared to the presidential. EU elections turnout is always extremely low and this is seen as a protest election in France with low impact.
Next year municipal will be the true test and the RN does poorly in polls.
> 3) This is a new world and Bardella is very good at campaigning on social media and has a very good reach with young people.
Young people don’t vote. Turnout is always extremely low. It’s a fairly useless demographic when it comes to winning the election.
> 4) The RN is pretty much leading in all social categories except for retired people
But they still lose in virtually all head-to-head and it’s a two rounds election.
> 5) Marine Le Pen being sidelined is actually a blessing in disguise.
The party is still controlled by the Le Pen through and through however. Heck Bardella is only there because he dated (is dating?) one of Le Pen’s grand daughter.
> 6) TINA (There is no alternative)
There are plenty of alternatives.
You have well liked figures of the center like Villepin and Phillipe biding their time waiting to see which one will be candidate.
The PS will probably soon have new leadership which should shake up the landscape on the left.
The right by taking a hard line approach is eroding the RN base.
Plus there will likely be three or four other far right candidates like last time.
It’s a huge mistake to think things will remain stable so far ahead of the election. See Macron was basically unknown three years before winning.
> I don't agree with the staying silent part.
I don’t see how you can disagree. RN controls nearly a third of the parliament. Do you see them acting as a vocal opposition? Clearly they are not. They have next to zero opinion on anything significant and avoided at all costs putting forward a prime minister.
What you are listing is not really being vocal. That’s selling dreams. Anyone can promise better salaries and less criminality without pushing forth anyway to achieve that. That’s the whole point.
I can see that you and I obviously disagree of this topic and I am not an oracle either so we'll see what happens.
> Can’t be compared to the presidential. EU elections turnout is always extremely low and this is seen as a protest election in France with low impact. Next year municipal will be the true test and the RN does poorly in polls.
It still shows momentum. They would have won the parliamentary elections also if the left had not put their differences aside and campaigned under the same banner however the NFP is breaking apart as we speak and so the left parties will all campaign separately.
Municipals don't mean much. The right wing party LR is extremely well implanted locally but had a colossal defeat in 2022 just like the socialists. Even Macron's party has/had trouble getting elected in local elections but that hasn't stopped him from being elected twice. So I don't think this is a good signal as to who will win in 2027.
> Young people don’t vote. Turnout is always extremely low. It’s a fairly useless demographic when it comes to winning the election.
That is true but they definitely increase the spread of the message of the RN. One thing to consider is that most people who use Facebook for example nowadays are the older generation and they vote in big numbers. The RN is also very good at creating viral content.
> But they still lose in virtually all head-to-head and it’s a two rounds election.
It depends on who they are facing but from the latest polls, it seems that they either have a tie or win/lose by less than a percent so within the margin of error really.
> The party is still controlled by the Le Pen through and through however. Heck Bardella is only there because he dated (is dating?) one of Le Pen’s grand daughter.
I don't think it matters to the people who do not like her. They see Le Pen and they don't vote for her but a fresh new face, well that could just do it.
> There are plenty of alternatives. You have well liked figures of the center like Villepin and Phillipe biding their time waiting to see which one will be candidate.
Villepin has already been in power, people like him but he has a legacy and ticks the box "been there, done that".
Same as Phillipe who was prime minister under Macron and is therefore the face of the so called Macronie in all but name. Unless he figuratively "kills" Macron before the election, how is he going to convince people that he would do things differently?
> The PS will probably soon have new leadership which should shake up the landscape on the left.
The PS is stuck between a rock and a hard place, they can't go further left because the more right wing members will go to Macron's party and they cant go further right because they will lose support of the left wing members of their party.
They are frozen in place. No wiggle room here.
> The right by taking a hard line approach is eroding the RN base.
The right is taking a pretended hard line. So far nothing has come out of it. It's Sarkozy 2.0 which means nothing will happen. Since the right wing parties started moving right in 2007 in order to kill the RN, the RN has not only grown stronger, it now dwarfs the old right wing party.
> Plus there will likely be three or four other far right candidates like last time.
Yes, for sure, most likely Zemmour, NDA, Asselinau and Bardella. But it doesn't matter because the people who vote for parties other than the RN will most likely vote for them in the run off.
> It’s a huge mistake to think things will remain stable so far ahead of the election. See Macron was basically unknown three years before winning.
I don't think that things will remain stable but I also don't see a new Macron emerging anytime soon. Macron came at a time where people wanted change and were tired of the right/left switch happening every 5 years. He was a fresh new face and without political baggage. That ship has unfortunately sailed but what he has done is weakened the old parties and basically created a boulevard for the far-right.
It was hard for Macron to form his center coalition when the country was not as divided as it is now. Today, it is basically an impossible task to recreate this sort of environment.
But in any case, we will see. personally my hunch is that Bardella will squeak by in the run off by less than a percent but who knows really? We have crossed the rubicon and there is no turning back.
Maybe some of the EU folks know a greater amount, yet, where did this come from?
Looking on WP, there's nothing... [1] Barely at article. Supposedly the European Anti-Fraud Office opened an investigation in Jan 2014. Never saw a mention in any of the elections. Figure Macron would have jumped on that.
In 2017, the European Parliament demanded repayment from Le Pen of almost €340,000. Also, seems like it would been jumped on. [2] "Parliament's financial services deducted tens of thousands of euros from her (Le Pen's) MEP allowance before she left Brussels in 2017. Threatened with an enforceable recovery order, Le Pen eventually repaid €330,000 in July 2023." [2]
Then the Le Monde article gets to actual serious issues: "a preliminary investigation was opened in France in March 2015 for breach of trust." 'A judicial investigation was opened in December 2016 on charges of "breach of trust," "concealment of breach of trust," "organized gang fraud," "forgery and use of forgeries" and "undeclared labor."' "In December 2023, at the end of a nine-year investigation, the investigating judges called for the FN and 27 of its senior members and employees to be tried." [2] Except the Le Monde article is also just a Sept. 2024 article.
Followed the French elections at least a little bit over the last half decade or so, and ... nothing. Read Le Monde at least a bit. Read France24 a bit. Not even a mention of Le Pen being the subject of a nine (9?) year investigation and repaying 300,000 already to the EU Parliament. She was under investigation for "organized gang fraud" during the last election? Seems like it came out of nowhere from the perspective of somebody in the US.
Did this actually make the news regularly in France or the EU? Not much of a supporter or anything, 1000's of miles away, yet all the articles are so recent, and the coverage so nothing, makes me want my tinfoil hat for computer churn articles.
> When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents. This is their standard playbook throughout the world.
Their position is that anyone who doesn’t drink the koolaid is a radical opposite side. It’s exhausting. When they oppress, it is righteous. When the other side holds them accountable, it's oppression. To them, equality and accountability are tyranny.
My perspective is that there are lot of people with an analogue of some type of fad called such-and-such derangement syndrome (not in DSM), but wholly in support of far-right/fascism -- blinders, for a better term.
We live in weird times. When I grew up, it was a civic duty and social expectation to stamp out fascism and punch Nazis. Now, people downvote and flag when their ills and rightful punishments are reported.
It was strange in the early 2010s when libertarianism (antithetical to fascism, except perhaps anarchocaptialism) seemed to embrace fascism at conferences. For lack of a quick source (it's been over a decade since I saw this happening), here is a medium writeup: https://thomas-perrett97.medium.com/from-hayek-to-hitler-an-...
Now, when you bring out the Nazis, it is called the Godwin point, and it tends to mark the end of constructive discussion and a good time to change the subject.
Marine Le Pen is a far-right politician, the Godwin point is close, and such subjects tend to get flagged on sight before it degenerates. Politics in general tends to get this treatment.
But this time, for such a hot topic, the discussion is, I think, better than expected. With interesting viewpoints independent from her political orientation. I guess that's how this topic was saved.
Every unthinking heuristic that can be exploited, will be. Everything devolves into claims of Nazism and fascism when it the claim is respected. This guy tomrod over here is a Nazi, someone needs to take them out.
That's the third EU country to arrest or ban the top opposition candidate or party. Georgescu in Romania, Spartans party in Greece, Le Pen in France. You could even say fourth: head of Gagauzia region in Moldova has been arrested a few days ago. And that's before you consider the attempts to ban AfD in Germany. Is that "democracy"? Would it be "democracy" if, say, Trump jailed Vance's main opponent in 2028?
Romania is definitely political, but the rest of the decisions are due to independent courts. Nobody, including Le Pen, believes this is politically motivated.
That is not what MLP is saying. She said that immediate application of the ineligibility sentence in particular is politically motivated.
And even more precisely, that the judges expressed this political motivation explicitly through the use of MLP running in the presidential election as presenting a risk to public peace.
I'm not claiming it is really in the deliberations as I'm yet to read those.
We're seeing just how "independent" courts really are in the US at the moment. There's no reason to believe they're any more "independent" there, especially in Eastern Europe and Greece.
This kind of punishing a politician, though correct legally, would only backfire on the party in power. This was seen in many cases throughout the history of democracies, including Trump's case. No wonder that, politicians happily get into jail as it would get them sympathy credit. And people are not entirely wrong in giving that sympathy.
Interestingly, the Lagarde case was not ruled by "regular" judges, but by a special court "of politicians, by politicians, for politicians". The idea, being, precisely, to try and deal with separation of power, and avoid the judiciary ruling against "the will of the people".
At the time, the decision was controversial because it was too "nice" with the former minister. I'm pretty sure you can find an archive of the FN/RN spokepersons of the time criticizing the "Cour de Justice de la République."
So, instead, let "normal judges" make decisions about all citizens, voters and elected alike ?
Suddenly that does not sound that appealing.
She will run again. She will keep her deputy job. Her "jail" will be much more confortable than Navalny's. She'll have other decades to run in other élections.
Her party will keep winning some, provided gas prices and taxes and rents still go up. I don't see a politician trying anything against that. She'll be fine.
> the decision was controversial because it was too "nice" with the former minister.
The decision was controversial because the elements presented as proof were weak.
Let’s not rewrite history and remember that Lagarde was guilty of pushing for arbitration where a panel awarded the sum and didn’t herself decide the pay out.
> Interestingly, the Lagarde case was not ruled by "regular" judges, but by a special court "of politicians, by politicians, for politicians"
This is not what the CJR is. It’s a special court which is only competent to judge actions committed by members of the government as part of their function. It mixes elected members of the parliament and senate (six each) and two judges.
It’s important to realise that before the CJR was created, there was only members of parliament in its predecessor the Haute Court and it was never called granting de facto immunity to ministers.
> This is not what the CJR is. It’s a special court which is only competent to judge actions committed by members of the government as part of their function. It mixes elected members of the parliament and senate (six each) and two judges.
Sure. However, it has been criticized for being too "soft" on politicians since the late 90s.[1]
Christine lagarde was found guilty of negligence, in favor of someone else. Marine Le Pen was found guilty of deliberately embezzling money for her own party. The cases are in no way comparable.
Lagarde allowed a different between Mr Tapis and the state to go to arbitration where a panel of three judges awarded the several millions - not her. This choice was found to be negligent by the CJR, a court composed mostly of politicians, after the pay out was invalided by the French justice system 8 years later. Lagarde was found guilty of pushing for arbitration as a minister when she shouldn’t have.
To quote the linked article: “The verdict came as a surprise as even the public prosecutor had admitted the evidence against Lagarde was “weak” during a five-day trial last week.”
This has absolutely nothing in common with what’s happening to Marine Lepen. Dozens of emails and messages prove that she presided over a setup designed to embezzle millions for the EU while being fully aware this was illegal.
This is really just a "they're all doing it too" finger pointing from Le Pen's party.
"The preliminary investigation - already targeting members of France's centrist MoDem party, conservative party The Republicans and the Socialist Party - was opened after a member of Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front asked the Paris prosecutor to look into the issue."
In the United States, you can compare the number of people in each president's administrations in recent years. There's a striking difference between Republican administrations and Democratic administrations.
If she's a clear cut fascist criminal and everyone on the other side is great then why wouldn't you want her to run? Should be easy to trounce her if she's as bad as you say.
So if someone is proven to be corrupt we should just let them run in elections and trust that they won’t use corruption or other immoral or illegal means to get elected? Or that they won’t do more of that if they do get elected. Maybe we should never convict any politician of any crime, what could go wrong
I mean why wouldn’t we just take anyone accused of a felony and just hold an election for some high office right there? Then if they win it’s because no crimes were committed, and if they lose obviously it’s because they were criminals. A simple majority should suffice and there’s no need to review any evidence of wrongdoing.
She committed crimes, and having the potential for a felon to achieve power over the government doesn't seem to be conducive for them to be punished under the law.
Allowing a populist criminal to run for office is not great for democracy.
I'm okay with this outcome. Especially if a jury of peers reviews the evidence and stops the far right-wing (fascist) politician from further compounding crimes or marrying their criminality with state power, often abusing the rights of people a democratic government is established to protect.
It is a brave thing to do, to hold popular people accountable for their actions (especially things like leaking secrets to geopolitical adversaries resulting in the deaths of intelligence personnel, or, other things like what Le Pen is guilty of), but it is necessary. Once you let it go, your country becomes ruled by authoritarians.
No, when a martyr becomes popular (elected), the "jury of peers" is likely be composed of the believers as well. They are not going to hold the martyr accountable, but rather their oppressors.
Is your suggestion to grant legal immunity to any and all far-right politicians so you can avoid their followers' ire just in case they become popular enough for election at some point in the future?
There was no jury in this case. In France jury trials are only in "Cour d'Assises", which deals with the most serious criminal cases.
Factually you can't call her or her party "fascist", either. This is really one of those terms that is over-used to an extent that is not useful at all.
We should all identify far right with fascism. In every case they have taken control, they exercise authoritarianism to the point of removal of dissent -- which is a hallmark of fascism.
I therefore reject your claim this is improper labeling.
The authoritarian right's playbook is simple but brilliantly effective.
The roadmap ends with a strong man dictator that has removed any and all hurdles towards absolute power so that the agenda can be implemented without compromise.
Any roadblock towards this is called "anti-democratic" which is the ultimate irony as those preaching it fully support the end of democracy.
The US is now an inch away from being a dictatorship as the last line of defense, judges, are under severe attack. They're targeted to be impeached, called "radical left" and Musk is throwing money at flipping votes.
This process is happening in several countries and it's baffling how many people eat it up, including in these comments.
I suppose it is true that democracy is fragile and that with a few nudges people vote to dismantle it themselves.
I'm not sure why you'd say there's room to argue about Romania (lying about campaign funding is probably the only easy provable reason to be banned) but it's not the topic here.
"The left". Would be nice to see how you came to this conclusion. Justice applies the law and she was found breaking it.
Also the current government is, by the most lenient definition in France, center-right. Although it shouldn't interfere with the justice system in any direct way, lest we want to enshrine even more the fact that politician in position of power shouldn't ever face consequences.
So... wait, should she just be allowed do multi-million euro frauds because she's so special? Like, if I did that, I would expect to go to prison. What's so different about her?
I think the GP's sentiment is more around the fact she cannot run for office, not that she isn't sitting in jail.
IMO, let her run, but still put her in jail. If the electorate still chooses her as the best option then it's hard to get away from the continued will of the majority. Don't let her out, but give the people who (and what) they wanted.
Actually I wouldn't have an issue with that had she been convicted of, say, assault. In that case it would be reasonable for the electorate to decide if her being convicted of assault makes her illegible in their eyes.
But here she has been convicted of fraudulent use of EU money to fund here own party. That money could be used to buy her votes.
France, and most EU countries I think, have strict laws about funding of political parties and campaigns in order to have a level playing field and prevent rich candidates / parties having an undue advantage. If politicians could illegally fund their campaigns beyond what is authorized that could be used to unfairly influence the vote.
> If the electorate still chooses her as the best option then it's hard to get away from the continued will of the majority.
This wouldn't work, there's an obvious loophole:
1. Commit crimes to get elected.
2. If you're caught and sent to prison, offer your supporters campaign money and political favors to vote for you.
3. Once elected, use the powers of your office to pardon yourself, reward your followers, and jail your opponents.
You could do something like: offer your billionaire friends control over government agencies that regulate their industries, and in return they could run sweepstakes where they offer your voters a chance to win $1M if they vote for you.
Don't do crimes, if you have done crimes you might be next to be responsible for them.
It's quite a simple concept in democracies under the rule of law, not sure if it's alien where you live.
Also, define the meaning of "left", since even if I try to stretch it to absurd levels I do not see how a French government led by Macron can be considered "left" but I live outside of your brain, pretty hard to understand what the boogeyman means to you.
We’ll see how it plays out, but this could be helping her party ultimately.
1. She is a woman. Her party is very conservative and a male figure would project more strength and attract voters that she might deter to parties further on the right (yes there are a few)
2. She is been here a long time, so she doesn’t exactly qualify as anti-establishment.
3. It makes the party looked harassed, and it is easy for them to state that “everyone is cheating, but they’re the only one paying for it”. Further cementing the image of the party as one of resistance.
4. She’s not good at debates. She gets destroyed every time.
I have been thinking for a long time that she’s the main reason why the far right doesn’t win in France. People would vote a Trumpian president for sure.
> She is a woman. Her party is very conservative and a male figure would project more strength and attract voters that she might deter to parties further on the right (yes there are a few)
From what I've been able to discern, among countries that have had an elected female head of state, those women often - if not typically - represent the right wing of the local politics. The idea that conservative parties would disdain a female leader as "weak" strikes me as a strawman created by their political opponents. (However, female conservative candidates for leadership do seem uninterested in treating their gender as a reason to vote for them.)
> She is been here a long time, so she doesn’t exactly qualify as anti-establishment.
This fundamentally misunderstands the meaning of the term.
stop applying american ideas to the french system. europe has many checks and balances at several levels, and embezzling Union funds for your campaign does in fact make you not eligible to run for office for some time. it’s not even permanent.
Really making it hard to not believe that France is trying to ban a legal candidate by making this cute shim where everything BUT being able to run is subject to the appeals process.
If you're caught using steroids before the race, you're banned from running in the race (and may be fined, and may face criminal charges). If you want to appeal that's fine, but you can't run in the race today.
She was caught improperly funneling EU funds to her own party (members), which would give her party an unfair advantage in any current political race.
Sorry, are you claiming that the independent judiciary who convicted her of embezzling funds considers her their "political opponent"? And that the sentence they handed down which is laid out by the French legal system is tantamount to "crushing dissidents"?
There are quite a few things were the sentence can be enforced even during the appeal.
For example, you can be jailed before your trial ; you can have your driving license overturned if you kill someone ; and, it turns out, you can get banned from running into élections if you're found guilty of embezzlement.
Fortunately for her, the next elections are in 2 years ; I would not be surprised is she get an appeal, a reduced ineligibility sentence to allow her to run in the next legislative election. And she might be happy with that - two round presidential elections are hard for her party, and, more importantly : winning an election is a _terrible_ situation in France.
Stop blaming the courts (and really, the legislature for making the law).
Le Pen is the person responsible, as is her party: Don't commit crimes, don't make leaders of people who commit crimes, and you won't have problems.
Yes, there is a potential for abuse, but eliminating the rule of law for political leaders is very dangerous. (Edit: You can't take a popular vote on whether someone - especially a political leader, and one in a populist movement - committed a crime.)
The problem is that criminal laws can't be applied, even in principle, without the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Criminal laws are written broadly and legislatures trust prosecutors to apply the laws to the subset of conduct that falls within the arguable letter of the law. That makes prosecution of political figures incredibly dangerous, because prosecution is inherently a discretionary act.
Consider 18 USC 1343:
> Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
A politically motivated prosecutor willing to stretch phrases like "property" and "false ... representations" could use 18 USC 1343 to turn minor infractions into federal felonies with the prospect of 20 years in prison. It's entirely up to the prosecutor to ensure that the atomic bomb of 18 USC 1343 is applied only to conduct that actually warrants such extreme charges.
I'd note that, had Jim Comey been willing to push the law as far as the words would allow, he would've had a legal basis to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felonies relating to handling of classified information: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-dir.... Comey's statement in connection with the decision to recommend no charges is instructive:
> Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.
>Criminal laws are written broadly and legislatures trust prosecutors to apply the laws to the subset of conduct that falls within the arguable letter of the law.
Not in France. You Brits and Americans have that weird Common Law system that relies on broad "laws" (more principles, really), judicial precedent and court decisions, whereas France and most of the world's judiciaries adopted Romans and Napoleon's Civil law system where the legislators write detailed legal codes that the courts then apply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
Honestly, for me, Common Law is a medieval sh*tshow where nothing is really legally certain...
Is that true of criminal law? (Genuine question, I know zilch about European criminal law.) Does French law have the concept of prosecutorial discretion?
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunit%C3%A9_des_poursuite...
So it would appear that French law has broadly the same power of prosecutorial discretion as US law.
Comon law proved to be more adaptable to different customs and cultures. Almost all of frances colonies sank into lawless despotism. Meanwhile many english colonies are or were vibeant lawruled democracies, even while beeing poor .
>Comon law proved to be more adaptable to different customs and cultures.
...Which is why civil law is the system of 150 countries /s
> he would've had a legal basis to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felonies
America is currently ann argument against popular democracy. Before we concede that electoral politics don’t work in a world with social media, maybe we can give increased prosecutorial discretion a chance. The alternative, after all, is just more authoritarian.
The voting system (FPTP) in the US results in a two party system which isn't representative of a good democratic system imo. Considering all of the different political divides I don't think two parties sufficiently cover the spectrum of opinions/stances.
> voting system (FPTP) in the US results in a two party system which isn't representative of a good democratic system imo
We have non-FPTP jurisdictions. They still default to partisanship. (The problem is probably too many elections, not enough reliance on appointment and selection by lot.)
Quite the opposite! Democracy is working in America, whereas it’s in jeopardy in (some parts of) Europe. You’re confusing “democracy” with “liberalism.” Democracy is not about free trade, or protecting immigrants, or the like. It’s about people being able to vote to live in the kind of society they want. If people want to pull back on liberalism in certain areas that’s democratic. What’s undemocratic is saying that “you can vote for anything you want as long as it’s liberalism.”
There’s a reaction throughout the entire west to free trade and immigration. In America, a plurality of voters supported the guy who promised mass deportations and tariffs, and now they’re getting exactly what they voted for. Maybe they won’t like the results, maybe they’ll be thrilled with them. The results will simply inform the next vote. What’s deeply broken are european systems that are trying to maintain liberalism at the expense of democracy.
But not all the european countries. Denmark and Sweden have retrenched on liberalism in the area of immigration—Denmark’s youngest generation is now more Danish than the population as a whole—and have largely solved the political polarization over the issue. That’s democracy working very well.
Essential and the most important part of modern democracy is freedom: Universal, individual human rights. It is the foundation of the US: 'All men are created equal and are endowed with inalienable rights ...', the land of liberty, home of the free, liberty and justice for all. The Constitution's limited remit to government, and the specific limits, are about freedom and self-determination.
And that's certainly liberal - that is the same foundation of classical liberalism and modern left-wing liberalism.
It's absurd to suggest otherwise; it's pointless arguments about verbiage. Nobody wants mob rule, nobody thinks of democracy without human rights and indvidual freedom, either scholars or the general public.
> It’s about people being able to vote to live in the kind of society they want.
Why should they get to decide en masse what people do individually? That's just dictatorhip of the majority, of the mob. Freedom is what the US and democracy are about.
> Democracy is not about free trade, or protecting immigrants, or the like.
It is; it's about freedom.
> It’s about people being able to vote to live in the kind of society they want. If people want to pull back on liberalism in certain areas that’s democratic.
Sure. And when the Athenians recalled Alcibiades [1] or put Socrates to death, that was democratic. I’m not arguing it’s not democratic. I’m arguing those were self-destructive acts that show the system didn’t work.
Note that I’m making a distinctly illiberal argument. In that, I dovetail with Trump’s supporters.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades
But the system worked! Immigration and the economy consistently rank as voters’ two key issues. On immigration, the decades-long elite consensus was for more immigration, including illegal immigration. But voters successfully defeated that elite consensus. They voted for mass deportations, got a guy who has started doing mass deportations, and as of the latest Yougov/CBS polling, overwhelmingly approve of Trump’s deportation program (58% approve, 42% oppose): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opinion-poll-trump-economy-tari....
Voters being able to override elite consensus to effectuate change to make the country more like what they want is the system working!
> But the system worked! Immigration and the economy consistently rank as voters’ two key issues
If immigration were the only thing this administration were doing we wouldn’t be having this debate.
The system isn’t working. We’re deterministically heading towards a world where we’re poorer and less secure based on policies (tariffs on Europe, Canada and Mexico) and people (Lutnick, Hegseth) that weren’t ever brought up in the election. Even if that had been campaigned on, the fact that the majority chooses stupid policies is an indictment of electoral politics. If the system “working” leads to its own destruction, it doesn’t work.
I notice that you've retreated to cherry picking polls on specific issues now that Trump's overall approval rating according to poll aggregators is negative (in record time, in fact, with the exception of Trump's first term).
Maybe we just need to stop quitting and capitulating, and commit to our liberty and self-determination. Prior generations committed their 'lives, fortunes, and honor'. We just need to fix social media, which will take an activated society.
> Prior generations committed their 'lives, fortunes, and honor'.
I think you hit the nail on the head with this.
We don't have honor as a social parameter any longer, so lives and fortunes lack the oomph of honor.
Granted, we also avoid the historically evinced drawbacks of honor-based societies, but we seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Are you prepared to give several Trump appointed judges prosecutorial discretion over who can run in the midterms and 2028?
The problem that prosecutorial discretion will have to overcome is selective enforcement, or the perception thereof. The right wing European media is claiming this was common practice across parties. Now I don't know the truth of it, but it is a hard thought to get out of ones head, and a hard negative to prove.
wrt Le Pen, I find it noteworthy that evey English news article I have read avoids describing the actual crime [1], Which does seem more substantial than 99% of the Trump cases.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2024/09/30/w...
This works differently in France. Americans need to stop comparing everything to their own country, your country not as great a democracy as you might think.
I'm mostly talking about the US, and not claiming it is great.
That said, in what ways do you think France is different?
Accounting politicians for crimes is not a problem as long as the judicial system is sufficiently independent from the executive. It is my impression that the French justice system is more independent and better protected against the executive branch than the US justice system, but I admit that I'm not an expert on comparing the two systems and could be wrong. It's really just a hunch aggregated from what I've heard over the years.
I don't know about France, but in the US, the prosecution falls under the executive, while the judges are independent.
This means the POTUS can decide who gets investigated and charged for a crime, and who doesn't get investigated and who gets charges dropped.
The executive can investigate its enemies, and ignore or drop charges for its friends.
It is looks very similar in France and in the US to some extent. I copy a post I made somewhere in this thread as I think it can help here:
Prosecutors are formally under executive control but since 2013 the justice minister should not give orders on individual cases.
France has an additional layer of independence compared to the U.S. because of the juge d’instruction (investigating judge), who is supposed to be independent from the executive like the courts judges, unlike prosecutors.
I say in principle because judges are appointed in France and not elected (similarly to federal judge in the US from what I understood). The executive as some control through appointments and career advancements but they are not supposed to use it to sanction or reward the judges.
The effectiveness of these independence mechanisms remains a subject of active debate, as evidenced by the relatively recent changes made to them.
That is all true but in this case she was sentenced to 2 years prison and 2 years house arrest, it's not exactly locking her up and throwing away the key for a minor infraction.
Letting judges bar someone from running for office is silly though, if French law allows that they should reconsider; if someone is popular enough to win a national election despite a reasonable criminal conviction they are popular enough to threaten the civil order if they are barred from office.
I mean that, in general, criminal laws can be interpreted to take minor wrongdoings and turn them into serious crimes. I’m not saying that was the case with Le Pen.
In fact, I think the conflict between law enforcement and politics in the Le Pen case is largely self-inflicted. There was no need to include the constraint on running for office in the punishment. And it seems like the wrongful conduct ended in 2017. Why did it take so long to work through to a verdict?
It is a funny fact though that Le Pen herself was pushing for automatic ban on running for elections for the stuff she did.
That is a problem, yet the law must still be enforced. There is no perfect solution but that isn't an argument for lawlessness, especially for powerful political leaders.
Most importantly, whatever the prosecutor does they cannot convict someone. That must be done by a court, an independent agency (in the US).
> That is a problem, yet the law must still be enforced.
Tellingly, you’re phrasing that in the passive voice, as if “the law” is “enforced” by higher beings sitting outside the political process. It is not. The enforcement of criminal laws is a political act, performed by political actors. And it is an inherently discretionary political act. Prosecutors actually have no obligation to enforce the law in every circumstance.
> There is no perfect solution but that isn't an argument for lawlessness, especially for powerful political leaders.
It’s not an argument for lawlessness, but rather an argument for viewing the political act of law enforcement as being secondary to the ultimate political act of electing leadership in any scenario where those two things could be seen as being in conflict.
Put differently, you have to see prosecution and elections as political acts that both seek to vindicate the will of the people. After all, criminal prosecutions are brought on behalf of the People to vindicate the public interest in law and order, not private rights. So it’s perfectly legitimate to ask whether, under particular circumstances, it’s more important to enforce some criminal law—especially one unrelated to elections—or whether it’s more important to ensure the public can choose its leaders through elections.
> you’re phrasing that in the passive voice, as if “the law” is “enforced” by higher beings sitting outside the political process. It is not. The enforcement of criminal laws is a political act, performed by political actors. And it is an inherently discretionary political act. Prosecutors actually have no obligation to enforce the law in every circumstance.
If you read my comments (maybe not in that one?), I agree and say that often. We must work with human institutions; that's not argument that they can't work, work well, or are useless. I can't think of an advanced democracy that has used that discretion to block a serious candidate (one who could win).
> It’s not an argument for lawlessness, but rather an argument for viewing the political act of law enforcement as being secondary to the ultimate political act of electing leadership in any scenario where those two things could be seen as being in conflict.
It would allow political actors to break laws with impunity - probably the most dangerous threat to the rule of law is from powerful political actors - simply because there is an election in the future.
> as if “the law” is “enforced” by higher beings sitting outside the political process
But this is what we get if embezzlement (and insurrection) go unpunished. Someone we look to outside and above the legal system to mete out retribution.
No, you’ve inverted my point. The political system must be all encompassing. Everything must be within and subject to the political system. The legal system should not be all encompassing—it should stop short of serious conflict with the political system.
Thus, in some extreme cases, the remedy for misconduct should be elections, or impeachment, not prosecutions.
> The political system must be all encompassing. Everything must be within and subject to the political system
Why? This is de facto what we have in America. It’s lead to neo-Peronism. It doesn’t work.
The next Democrat candidate could recapitulate Trump’s January 6th pardons by promising to pardon anyone who burns down Teslas. If the rest of their platform is tenable, and if the Tesla fires are a few years in the past, the electorate might be fine with that. (Or not. Either way, the damage gets done.)
Do that for long enough and the public will demand someone outside the political system to rule over it. If you leave the final word on corruption to the political system, the system will evolve an autocratic element that polices itself.
> The next Democrat candidate could recapitulate Trump’s January 6th pardons by promising to pardon anyone who burns down Teslas.
I hope you are not comparing those things - one trying to overthrow democracy and killed people, the other vandalism that damages cars.
> hope you are not comparing those things - one trying to overthrow democracy and killed people, the other vandalism that damages cars
One can compare things without equating them. In this case, yes, I am comparing them. (In the end, both have—to date—been nothing more than destruction of property and trespassing. Getting killed being an idiot isn’t the same as killing people.)
I see countless discussions on HN about:
- innocent people convicted in court in error
- laws selectively enforced where this person never gets charged, yet this person gets put in prison for the exact same thing
- a byzantine legal code that the average person can't understand ("show me the man, and I'll show you the crime")
Now take that and layer on top a competitive legal system where your political opponent doesn't have to defeat you at the ballot box, they can just get you disqualified by having you convicted of a crime.
It's a system that is ripe for abuse.
Bobby Sands sticks out for me - a member of the Provisonal IRA who became a Member of Parliament while in British Prison. I thought it reflected quite well on the UK - despite this man committing violent acts in an effort to break Northern Ireland away from the UK, he was allowed to stand in Parliament of the very same system.
Then look at the Singapore system - even a relatively minor conviction like defamation (a fine only) will disqualify you from office. A fact the ruling party has used again, and again and again to eliminate opposition politicians once they get popular enough.
No system or person is perfect; no god will come down and save us; we need to find solutions using human institutions. What also is ripe for abuse is a system where politicians have impunity for corruption. At least being arrested, prosecuted, and convicted requires several agencies and branches of government and a public trial that follows laws.
Democracy has done very well in that regard. The US is an exception, in many ways, in that it generally won't prosecute current heads of state. Netanyahu is being prosecuted and investigated for another crime, even after abusing power to avoid it. France has charged sitting high officials, so have others.
But what is gained from barring people convicted of a crime from holding public office?
- Keeping people out with questionable character?
- Preventing crimes from being committed while in office?
Neither of those are all that convincing. Voters will be aware of the criminal past of any candidate. They can make their own personal judgement when they vote.
And I’m not sure what you mean by democracy has “worked well in that regard except for the US”.
If your goal is to ban people with criminal records to prevent corruption, there are plenty of democracies with a far worse track record when it comes to democracy than the US.
> Voters will be aware of the criminal past of any candidate. They can make their own personal judgement when they vote.
My father straight up told me: I know nothing of this case, but it's obviously a set-up by leftist judges. People don't care about the truth anymore...
If people cheat in a contest and you don't disqualify them, you give everyone an incentive to cheat: ideally they get away with not being found out, but even if they are found out their cheating can still have a positive RoI.
The only way to keep things fair is to exclude those who deliberately flaunt the rules, as is the case here.
But even aside from that, someone who deliberately breaks the rules isn't fit to enforce them.
> someone who deliberately breaks the rules isn’t fit to enforce them
To give an American example, if someone deliberately broke Jim Crow laws in the South they should be disqualified from office?
The problem with this approach is that it assumes court decisions are always just and correct. Based on numerous examples I don’t think that’s a reasonable assumption.
Versus the opposite approach which says criminal convictions don’t automatically disqualify you, it’s up to the voters to decide if you’re fit for office.
I don't think every criminal conviction should disqualify someone from running for office, but definitely every election-related crime. If you embezzle funds to instead market yourself for the election, who's to say you won't use your new government power for the same purpose?
Who's to say that you won't use your new power to help your party colleagues get away with the same crime, but this time without the public knowing about it?
Fair point.
So if we create a system that allows people to be banned from holding political office how do we stop it from being abused?
We know that justice is subjective, and mistakes can be made.
I would point to Singapore as an example where defamation laws are routinely used to prevent opposition politicians from holding office.
We could start by using election-related crimes as disqualifying events. Did you embezzle money to further your campaign? Sorry, you aren't allowed to participate.
Unless a justice system is captured by one party (like in the US), I trust it more to determine the truth than I trust politicians that want to abuse such "loopholes".
Cannot help comparing with another case: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/christine-laga...
Lets continue the comparisons, instead of attacking the credibility of French courts, who have a fantastic reputation of making politicians of all sides of the political spectrum accountable...
"Nicolas Sarkozy's trial: Prosecutors request 7-year prison sentence for the former president" - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/03/27/nicolas-...
"Former French Prime Minister François Fillon sentenced to five years" - https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/29/europe/france-franois-fil...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:French_politicians_co...
Another one with Cahuzac: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_Cahuzac#:~:text=En%20m...
Don't remember the right whining about how ineligibility is undemocratic with this one (Cahuzac is left leaning)
It's hard not to notice a pattern here. Posts involving DOGE, Elon Musk, or critical takes on the erosion of legal norms in the U.S. are flagged within seconds.
Take this post, for example, flagged almost immediately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43544534 https://youtu.be/6DsYAoIN3l8?t=65
It tells the story of a Maryland father wrongly imprisoned in El Salvador due to an "administrative error." The U.S. government admitted fault in court, yet refuses to take corrective action. Silence follows.
Meanwhile, a post discussing Marine Le Pen...A MAGA adjacent figure remains untouched. Funny how moderation seems oddly selective when certain narratives are involved.
And Dang will basically call you a conspiracy theorist if you even suggest that something untoward is happening despite the mountains of evidence.
Le Pen herself voted for that law.
Not sure about which law you're talking about but she couldn't have voted for a law that applied to her case as she was elected to the Assemblée Nationale in 2017.
The case she has been sentenced for is about facts that happened before that, while she was a member of the European Parliament (until 2016).
You're absolutely right. My fault. I should have checked what I read. Unfortunately, I cannot change the original comment any longer. In any case, given their involvement in embezzlement the Front National/Rassemblement National would likely not vote for laws against corruption.
> Don't commit crimes, don't make leaders of people who commit crimes, and you won't have problems.
Not to be disrespectful, but this is naive.
In a perfect world only "real" crimes would be prosecuted.
But almost every despot prosecuted their opponents by claiming they were criminals. Remember Nelson Mandela spent decades in prison as a criminal. The leaders of the KPD & SPD parties were both arrested as criminals during Nazi Germany. Putin has arrested many of his opponents, citing criminal behavior.
Saying "don't commit crimes" overlooks that the "crimes" themselves may not be real.
I read the part >>don't make leaders of people who commit crimes, as covering that scenario . Arresting people for "crimes" of getting in your way to power, is a crime in and of itself - even if it is not on the books, so don't make leaders of them.
It's not naive. I agree the world isn't perfect, but we have to operate with imperfect human systems - that's life. More imperfect is politicians with impunity for corruption - at least when they arrest someone, there is rule of law, it requires a trial (even a jury, if the defendant desires), etc.
You are reaching far beyond France to South Africa's minority dictatorship and Nazi Germany for examples. The latter is a great example of political leaders with impunity.
Can you provide any examples at all in modern democracies, at any level of government?
- Russian Federation is technically a democracy.
- Belarus, same thing.
- Ukraine, same thing.
They're all in Europe, too.
- Israel, where the Netanyahu's trial is commonly seen (by both sides!) as a way to prevent Netanyahu from serving as the PM.
- Arguably, US with the Trump conviction.
These are the ones I'm personally aware of, it's more than likely there are better examples.
(In a "no true scotsman" way of thinking, it's easy to debunk any such cases by saying they're bad examples of a democracy. Then again, it's the same argument with any political system — proponents of communism will say that communism was never implemented properly, for example.)
> technically
I don't know what that means, but Russia is not a democracy - the people don't have self-determination to choose their government. Nor is Belarus.
Anyway, what are these examples of? When in a real democracy has a court corrupted the democratic process? Not in Ukraine either - their laws just push off elections during wartime IIRC. And was that done by the courts? Have they jailed the opposition?
> Arguably, US with the Trump conviction
Trump was elected after that!
> Russia is not a democracy
How do you determine this though? There are candidates. Majority of the people vote. The one voted for the most wins.
Sure, _some_ candidates are in jail (or dead) — but that's strictly because they were convicted in a fair trial, they're criminals, you see.
I argue that there are similarities between two regimes blacklisting political candidates from the democratic process.
> When in a real democracy
If we cherry-pick the ones we like to be "real", and the ones we dislike to be "fake", then by definition the "real" ones are the good ones.
> Not in Ukraine either
E.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/20/ukraine-suspen...
Sure, not a court per se — it was apparently the country's national security and defense council that took the decision to ban the parties from any political activity.
But I agree, it's whatever.
> Trump was elected after that!
Yep, despite well-documented efforts to block him from running. The outcome is I think a win for democracy. That democrats think of this as a defeat is amusing to me. (I'm an foreigner and don't live or vote in the US, so no horse in the race either way.)
>> Russia is not a democracy
> How do you determine this though?
By not wasting time on intentional time-wasting arguments.
> That democrats think of this as a defeat is amusing to me.
Not most Democrats that I've seen - they wanted the law followed (for future reference: Democratic party members are Democrats, those who favor democracy are democrats).
Thanks! I totally forgot about case-sensitivity of Democrats, and sure, I meant the big D.
For those wondering whether this is targeted harrassment, France has a long history of this kind of sentence for people of all political stripes. Wikipedia has 108 pages covering just the most significant ones: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:Personnalit%C3%...
That is a great list. The principle behind this is the defensive democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy
how is sentencing for corruption connected to defensive democracy?
The headline really should be Le Pen guilty of embezzlement, ineligible to run for public office for X years.
Seems like a reasonable policy we should adopt in the US…
Wouldn't matter. Trump is already a felon and should be ineligible. We have at least two parallel lehal systems in the US, probably more. The more "important" you are the less the rules are able to touch you. That's the american way.
This aligns with America's original "sin", rule of law versus a disguised aristocracy. It's always there beneath the surface.
People find the dream of hitting the jackpot far more appealing than creating a genuinely classless society.
The Wikipedia article has "deprival of the rights of individuals and parties from running for election" listed as a method. So I assume the prison/fine part of the sentencing wouldn't really be defensive democracy but barring her from office is. (Don't think I would feel positively about that in the U.S. but nonetheless the concept is there.)
Applying the laws regardless of if that person is a political candidate.
That's the case in any working democracy. Defensive democracy is a different conception, e.g. the German constitution allows for party prohibitions. In a defensive democracy, rules like party prohibitions are ideally not applied by an ordinary court but by an independent political organ. To give an example from Germany, the German Supreme Court is an independent political organ that serves as a power division element to check the work of the two parliaments for constitutionality. The "highest" ordinary court is the Bunderverwaltungsgericht.
Hehe, now let’s wait and see how they grapple with the fact that you can’t have both! It‘s either criminal use of EU funds or defensive democracy, unless you’re drenched in kool-aid.
The verdict was clearly and unambiguously about a criminal abuse of EU funds and nothing else. It's noteworthy that a list of people was sentenced for it, not just Le Pen.
sure, and just 4 days prior to that totally neutral verdict another french court ruled that political bans were legal. what a coincidence, what a convenience. something that was never even considered legal in France just “clearly and unambiguously” fell into that judge’s hands days ahead.
No, there’s nothing noteworthy here, especially for a crime Le Pen didn’t committed herself and which every single party of France is guilty of.
Don’t choke on that kool aid!
You're talking to the wrong person since I would fully support a prohibition of the RN if France's democracy was as combative as it should be. I just don't think this played a role here. Politicians complaining bitterly about being persecuted for crimes they've committed is not a new thing, though, they always believe they deserve special treatment.
>The principle behind this is the defensive democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy
Excuse me but what in the hell? To come in here and redefine a corruption investigation as being in that camp is not only an insult to the reader but it an insult to everyone who both cares about civil rights and government corruption at the same time.
Defensive democracy is just marketing spin on exactly the sort of civil rights violating process that gives the establishment huge advantage over any challenger and exactly the sort of crap totalitarian regimes love and leverage to great effect.
The wikipedia page that you linked lists the following examples of "defensive democracy".
>Surveillance by the security corps (especially military and police intelligence) of activists who are considered dangerous, or after entire associations outright;
>Restrictions on the freedom of movement or action over bodies suspected of endangering democracy;
>Deprival of the rights of individuals and parties from running for election
>Outlawing of organizations considered a danger to democracy;
>Cancellation of elections as a last resort ""
Does that sound like the kind of stuff that fair, well run by rule of law, stable democracies with lots of buy in from the populace do to you? Because it sure doesn't to me. It's basically a list of stuff unpopular governments use to stay in power a little longer.
To come in and lay claim to the credibility of of something that everyone can agree is good (prosecuting corruption, equality under the law) and siphon some of that off onto a subject that is highly controversial (selective violations of civil rights, nominally for a good reason) by just falsely claiming the good thing is a subset of the controversial thing is dishonest and morally reprehensible.
You are just confused because you bought the democracy fairy tale. There is no "real" democracy. There are nation states and in this case it is the French nation state. Politicians come and go but the state (also known for some reason as the deep state) made of bureaucrats, military personal, intelligence, etc... are not going to let some random dude rule over the country just because he got 50%+ of the population electing him. That's the pipe dream of democracy but not the reality.
I'm thinking a certain level of bureaucracy is needed even in the most democratic of governments, after all we don't (normally) elect folks to argue about whats in each others underwear. We talk about "running" the country. We want laws, statutes, organizations, and sometimes the tasks and end goals are big enough with these constructs to the point where they should span election cycles. Sure, currently the US is in "burn it all down" mode but this is not efficient government at all. This "burn everything down" thing with every election cycle just spends our nations resources to no good end.
Course, the problem with democracy is that if you elect a crook, you'll get a crime ring haha but I guess democracy also means giving folks what they ask for.
A lot of words to say "I do not agree with the judgement of a fair and independet court because I feel otherwise".
>Does that sound like the kind of stuff that fair, well run by rule of law, stable democracies with lots of buy in from the populace do to you?
...Yes?
Or are you saying politicians can just barge in and say "the rules don't apply to me because I'm popular"? Because that's how you don't get stable democracies. What you get is Trump, or the Red Brigades, or the Brown Shirts running things to the ground. Because the motto of those orgs is "one man, one vote... One last time"
Are you okay with Trump having the power to do each of those quoted actions? To decide if the opposition is a threat to democracy or if elections must be canceled "as a last resort".
I read that list and it looks like instructions on how to end democracy, not preserve it
Not advocating for that specific list of actions, but the idea is that the courts have the power to do those kinds of things, not politicians. That's the whole point - you set up the legal system in a way that helps to keep democracy stable and then the courts enforce that so politicians don't have untrammelled power. That's (theoretically) why the judiciary is a separate branch of government.
But the question is still there. Are you comfortable with a Trump appointed judge having those powers?
To put the long story short: yes.
Americans made their bed, now let them lay in it. Ideally those tools would have been used against him, but since they weren't... now is the time to reap the results of that inaction.
Every democracy has a failure point. The US seems to be past that now, where the executive is starting to ignore the judicial branch. In my view, if the institutions were working correctly, Trump would never have been able to stand again after January 6th, and this would have been as a result of judgements by judges appointed by the executive. But institutions are run by humans and sometimes nothing can save them.
Trump should have been the target of defensive democracy, not the abuser of it. At least if US would have had a working version of the concept.
So your question seems to evade the point.
As you said “no system is perfect” so you’d have to accept that it fails to stop someone like Trump from getting into office.
It’s like having a gun to defender yourself then the criminal takes it from you.
So are you comfortable with someone like Trump using those same tools?
Moot point as someone like Trump ignores existing tools and just makes his own.
Also, Trump could have been stopped by the processes in place in USA, they just were not properly used. There were several cases open against him, they just failed to do what they were supposed to.
How does Trump "make tools"? You think he can twist Congress' arm?
And no, Trump couldn't have been stopped because the US has very limited rules over criminal convictions preventing running for President.
This isn't Europe ya know.
That's not the problem. The US now effectively has a system where you don't prosecute presidents for any crime. You should note that the ongoing criminal investigations against Trump were mostly cancelled when it became obvious that he'll be the next president.
If this system had been in place when Nixon did his crimes, he would've just shrugged and kept going.
You are indeed not Europe now, not even close. Well, except for Hungary and Belarus.
You are again comparing the flawed US "democratic" system to a real democracy. Trump should not be able to gain those tools because a functioning democracy protects the rule of law and holds justice to be above all other concepts. In the US, the legal system is a sham and the levers of power are easily taken for abuse (not to mention corporate capture of the two political parties which control all political life). So while Trump should not be able to capture those tools, it is only possible because the US does not have a real functioning democracy. In places like France, the state ensures that it is not possible to easily take complete power as Trump has in the US.
In short, no, Trump should not be able to take these tools. But in actual democracies they have checks to ensure that this is not possible while in the US no such checks exist.
I didn’t ask if Trump should be able to take those tools.
I asked if you would be comfortable if he did.
Either you believe it is possible to create a perfect political system which never makes a mistake, or you believe mistakes can be made thus those tools should never be available to those in power.
Which one is it?
That's easy. It's false dichotomy.
Saying either the world is perfect or not perfect is a false dichotomy?
I’m sure that encompasses all possible outcomes, so clearly it’s not false.
>Or are you saying politicians can just barge in and say "the rules don't apply to me because I'm popular"?
I hope you misrepresent due to ignorance and not deliberately.
Nobody is saying that politicians should not be investigated. And nobody is saying that politicians should not be convicted and even put in prison.
What people are rightfully baffled about is the riddance of the passive election right - as in, inability to be elected. If a candidate was convinced and is in prison, then it's up to the voters to decide if they still trust that person and if they consider the conviction rightful and not bias.
Surely, if the conviction was pure as a tear of a newborn baby and there was no dirty persecution of the political competitors, surely voters would take that into account and there would be no need for artificial restrictions. But that requires the absence of political hunt. One needs to impose artificial restrictions only if there is fault play.
The EU is taking the tried and tested ways Putin used to destroy his opposition. First Romania, now France.
P.S. The same critique applies to the American democratic travesty of "current/former criminals are not allowed to vote".
The trouble with this is that a criminal that has enough capital to back him/her can use the media to make it seem like it's a political hunt even when it isn't. Supporters of a corrupt criminal will benefit a lot from getting them elected, whereas the opposition needs to spend a lot of money just to keep things as they are. Usually these people are friendly to capital as well, and the opposition are the "little people" who can't organize enough money to campaign against these liars and their backers. I can't see better options here other than to use the state to protect themselves.
At some point we have to trust the electorate whether we like it or not, or democracy is impossible. If the populace is easily brainwashed by the media to believe in the innocence of a corrupt and extremist candidate they could just as easily be brainwashed on any issue or candidate so what's the point of letting them vote at all?
> Usually these people are friendly to capital as well, and the opposition are the "little people"
Don't know if this is actually true, I assume capitalists generally prefer stable market-oriented politicians and not far-right kleptocrats in favor of protectionist trade wars. And plenty of wealthy people value democracy for its own sake, Kamala outraised Trump in the 2024 election for example.
Also I doubt traditional media spend plays as large a role in a nationwide contest with a lot of eyes, if I recall during Trump's 2016 primary candidacy Fox News tried to go against him but was rebuked by their own viewers (who fell in love with him on social media) and forced to bend the knee.
Cults of personalities are more dangerous than other types of brainwashing though, and the right level of protection from the state here should be other checks and balances on the office's powers.
I'm starting to think that current forms of democracy have become outdated and impossible due to the effects of social media and the levels of wealth concentration. When liars can spread their own truths through social media, and there exists such concentrations of wealth that they're able to buy the platforms, manipulate the algorithms, use bots etc. to boost the lies, it's become too hard for the average person to figure out what the actual truth is and base their decisions on that. The fact checking and bias in dispersed traditional media that we used to have was not perfect, but it was better than what we have now with the combination of concentrated traditional media and social media.
If we don't want to use the state to protect democracy by limiting it, then we either need to limit the concentration of wealth so that no small group of people has the power to spread the lies, or we need new forms of democracy that are resistant to such things.
The Romania-ization of European democracies has just begun. Once Brussels sends „democracy-protecting“ tanks into the capitals of its member states, the „EU-SSR-meme“ will have successfully completed the „conspiracy“ life cycle we‘ve become so adjusted to lately (conspiracy > meme > reality). Just remember to, in the meantime, de-humanize every complainer as „Putin-Puppet“ because how else can we protect democracy if not by eliminating dissent, eh?
Six have been added since I wrote this comment. Le Pen wasn't the only person convicted in this trial of course...
I've heard people on the radio (ha yes I listen to that ;-)) that they disagree with Le Pen being banned from running for president.
That seems strange to me as this was public (eu) money that was funneled into her own movement, i.e. bolstering her popularity in some way. So letting her run in the elections would basically mean she would get away with the fraude.
At the risk of just repeating a previous comment, if you actually want to live in a democracy you have to trust the electorate at some level. I don't know the specifics of this case but if it's clear cut corruption it should be easy to make that case to the electorate and absolutely destroy Le Pen in the election.
If it's not that easy, then banning her from running is even worse.
That's what happened - some officials trusted the electorate at some level and decided that the rules the electorate chose to make via their representatives should be followed. Those officials also trust the electorate to change the rules if they want to.
That's a very charitable way of explaining away literally anything.
Let me try:
It's not like Putin started a war, but rather some officials trusted the electorate at some level and decided that the rules the electorate chose to make via their representatives should be followed. The representatives being Putin and friends. Those officials also trust the electorate to change the rules if they want to.
There were no actual attempts at a coup btw, so the electorate is evidently happy with this.
Your try failed due to major inconsistencies with reality, so no, turns out you can't explain literally anything.
The list of inconsistencies you gave, while complete, is also empty.
Only when the rules are followed.
For democracy to work properly politicians need to follow the rules.
That's where it gets tricky.
Ultimately, rules come from the people in a democracy.
If they decide they want a candidate who broke the rules, that's where it gets messy in political philosophy.
Should the democratic will of the people from years ago or decades ago override the democratic will of the people now? Of course that's the general idea of having constitutions and such, but it can only ever be a matter of degree, and there's no right answer as to how much.
There's nothing messy about this.
Rules should be followed. If when rules are broken no punishment is applied, the rules are meaningless. Once rules become meaningless, everyone will be emboldened to break the rules, to the detriment of society as a whole.
If you want the rules changed, vote for them being changed, don't give free pass for any asshole to break them.
Of course it's messy.
> Rules should be followed.
But free, democratic elections is a "rule" too -- not just a rule, but a bedrock principle.
Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate? Why should someone from the past be allowed to nullify my preferred vote in the present?
There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office. The question is whether it's outweighed by other democratic concerns. It's messy.
> Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate? Why should someone from the past be allowed to nullify my preferred vote in the present?
All elections follow rules set by a previous electorate unless you want to first vote on defining the rules for an election every time you have an election.
If Trump were to actually run for a 3rd term, would you argue that he should be able to because term limits were set in place by a previous electorate?
Obviously they have to follow the rules for how to count votes, establish boundaries, etc.
But there is definitely a serious philosophical argument that term limits are inherently undemocratic.
I personally think they're necessary, but at the same time I realize they are undemocratic. They're literally taking away the ability for an electorate to freely choose.
All I'm saying is, the tradeoffs get messy. Restricting candidates from running can be a slippery slope. Look at what's happening in Turkey, where the popular opposition candidate was just barred from running. How do you know when you've gone too far? Barring candidates can corruptly entrench power, even when following the "rules" to the letter. What then?
This entire argument can be summarized as "no popular politician should ever have to obey any law." I realize you'll respond that you don't mean anything that extreme, of course. But the set of principles you're trying to articulate are, in fact, exactly that extreme. I don't want to live in that world and neither will you, when you have to experience it.
I expect I’m going to be hearing “term limits are inherently undemocractic” pretty fucking frequently for the next three years
Erdogan has consolidated power independently and undemocratically and is using it to jail his opponents. That is completely different from this situation where a politician is engaging in anti-democratic actions and is then barred from running by an independent judiciary.
> term limits are inherently undemocratic
A society where the people are not able to participate in the electoral process is not a democratic society. True democracies represent the will of all people, regardless of whether they are part of the majority or whether they were eligible to vote in the single election which transitioned the political system from democracy to dictatorship.
Oh, Erdogan consolidated his power over the last few decades democratically. Rural turks came out in mass to vote for him over past decades. Incidentally, in the past he was actually jailed by his political opponents and banned from politics.
> Look at what's happening in Turkey, where the popular opposition candidate was just barred from running.
Ironically Turkey is in this situation precisely because Erdogan removed term limits and spent decades consolidating his power. Same with China where Xi Jinping did the same. And Russia with Putin. All prime examples of functioning democracies, right?
These rules are specially to prevent people from setting themselves up as emperor for life and if they are removed that's almost always the exact thing that happens.
Democracy isn't a perfect system, as much as Americans tend to believe it is. It needs some guidelines to keep it functional. And even with them it's a compromise, not perfection.
> Barring candidates can corruptly entrench power, even when following the "rules" to the letter. What then?
Bold claim. Bold claims require bold evidence. You provided none.
Two sentences previous, I literally stated:
> Look at what's happening in Turkey, where the popular opposition candidate was just barred from running.
Are you aware of the current situation in Turkey? If that's not bold evidence, I literally don't know what is.
Exceptional what happens in Turkey does not resemble in the slightest what happens in France.
If France failed to punish Le Pen, they would be takinya step into creating their own French Erdogan.
> does not resemble in the slightest what happens in France.
Are you really so sure?
Why was she the only one barred from running from office? Why not the other eight officials also found guilty?
> Are you really so sure?
Yes.
> Why was she the only one barred from running from office?
Because she was judged by an independent court and found guilty of embezzlement.
> Why not the other eight officials also found guilty?
I would have to read the decision to give this answer. Many things are considered when a judge gives out a sentence. Two murders may result in different prison length depending on circumstances, for example.
Obviously this could turn into a very long conversation.
I'll just leave you with this considered analysis:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/04/01/why-marine-le-p...
Particularly:
> The crimes of which Ms Le Pen has been convicted are serious, but not of the same order. France’s harsh sentence in this case limits the choice of citizens who are capable of judging for themselves who should get their vote. By creating a mechanism that politicians might be thought to have co-opted, the law encourages talk of conspiracy—especially if, like Ms Le Pen, the barred politician belongs to a party that is founded upon a suspicion of the elites.
> The danger of courts aggressively sentencing politicians is that both the law and the courts become seen as partisan. Judiciaries rely on citizens accepting verdicts with which they disagree. Elections are supposed to generate consent for the incoming government. A poll after Ms Le Pen’s conviction found just 54% of French thought she was treated like any other accused, a narrow margin of confidence in judicial independence. Among RN voters, 89% thought she was singled out for political reasons.
> France’s harsh sentence in this case limits the choice of citizens who are capable of judging for themselves who should get their vote.
That vote would be tainted by her embezzlement of campaign funds. The rest of this analysis is void once the author fails to consider how badly democracy can be damaged once election regulations are not respected.
Of course, the author may jave ulterior motives, and wants to defend Le Pen in this case because he wants to see democracy in Europe weakened from within. But I sm giving the benefit of doubt here and presuming stupidity rather than malice.
But voters would decide how much the embezzlement continued to matter, after she had already served time and paid a large fine. That would be the actual democratic outcome. Letting the people choose, as opposed to taking away their choice.
You, on the other hand, are presenting Marine Le Pen as a threat to democracy, presumably because you don't like the far right. But you're just one voter. Why not trust the electorate? Voters chose Giorgia Meloni and I don't see Italian democracy falling apart.
I'm not far right at all. I'm not even right. But I worry it's dangerous and will backfire to take choice away from an electorate because of some misuse of funds (that didn't benefit herself financially) that she is already being heavily punished for at a personal level. She's being punished. Voters shouldn't be by taking away their right to choose.
> But voters would decide how much the embezzlement continued to matter
This is not up to voters to decide. If Le Pen murdered someone it wouldn't be up to voters for decide if the murder mattered.
Politicians don't have a separate legal system for them that allow voters to be judges. They are subject to the same intependent judiciary.
All the rest of your response falls apart after that.
I mean you could easily argue that any election rules are undemocratic. The rules for the US presidential election are quite flawed for example.
The rules can be changed but again there are rules for how to do that! It's rules all the way down.
You can't have a functioning democratic system without rules.
The problems start when people start thinking that rules don't matter or aren't applied evenly.
> not just a rule, but a bedrock principle.
Only when the rules are respected by everyone involved.
If we are playing football (or soccer for the barbarians across the pond), a core principle is to score goals. If in the middle of the game I punch you in the face, that principle stops mattering super fast.
> Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate?
Because that is how rules and regulations work. If you want them changed, change them properly, don't go breaking them because your pet right wing politician was punished for breaking them.
> There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office
I fundamentally disagree. The only thing anti-democratic is to allow someone that does not respect the democratic rules for running for office, for they will undermine democracy from within.
> The only thing anti-democratic is to allow someone that does not respect the democratic rules for running for office, for they will undermine democracy from within.
Surely you see the catch in this belief. If there is a group of people who can "allow" others to run for election then the system is not democratic at its core.
> If there is a group of people who can "allow" others to run for election then the system is not democratic at its core.
It is democratic at its core. Any democracy has an independent judicial system that can ensure that rules are being followed properly.
Separation of powers between executive, legislative and judiciary, does it ring a bell to you?
If the judiciary stops doing its job of banning those that would cheat elections, you wouldn't have a democracy anymore.
Or if the judiciary has any sort of bias as is implied in this case. (I don't pretend to know the details)
I enthusiastically endorse the separation of powers and firmly believe that people should follow systems, not people. Perhaps it just a global coincidence, but the recent spate of candidate disqualification (US, Romania, Turkey, France) gives the appearance of democratic decay.
> Or if the judiciary has any sort of bias as is implied in this case. (I don't pretend to know the details)
Then don't assume the judiciary is biased by following up with a disclaim that you are repeating baseless conjecture. Le Pen was judged with her right to legal defense, found guity, and punished accordingly. This is democracy working as it should.
> I enthusiastically endorse the separation of powers and firmly believe that people should follow systems, not people.
Based on the content of your posts, I sincerely doubt your enthusiastic endorsement.
You are very quick to make excuses for the right wing politician that was punished for embezzlement, claimed repeatedly that her being banned from office is undemocratic, and claimed without a shred of evidence that the court that judged her is biased.
Forgive me if I think you are bullshitting me here.
> Perhaps it just a global coincidence, but the recent spate of candidate disqualification (US, Romania, Turkey, France) gives the appearance of democratic decay.
Comparing France to Turkey is pure bad faith argumentation. If you genuinely think that Turkey and France share any sort of democratic decay you are very ill informed.
If Le Pen was not punished, I would agree France was taking a step in creating its own French Erdogan.
You must be confusing my posts with someone else. Or claim doesn't mean what you think it means. Forgive me if it's difficult to forgive you when you place so much negative spin on what I wrote.
Only if those people act in anti-democratic ways. E.g. if they apply the law selectively, if they forego or restrict due process, and if they play around with the meaning of words and crimes then yeah, that's anti-democratic. For example, people brought up what's happening in Turkey, and I agree what's happening there is anti-democratic.
But if the people involved are not making up crimes, but prosecuting crimes; if they are not targeting people specifically, but enforcing the law that applies to everyone; and if they are allowing for the maximum possible due process, then there really isn't much of a case for that process being anti-democratic.
> There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office.
i’m curious, do you think age minimums are ok? i feel like with this opinion have to throw out all restrictions on the ability to run for office to be consistent.
Nobody is prevented from voting by this sentence.
You're acting like computers, or neutral actors external to the political system, decide "when rules are broken" and what "punishment" to apply.
That's entirely the wrong way to think about government. Government isn't about rules, it's about allocation of power. You have to think about government in terms of who is entrusted with power to make which decisions. If you entrust judges and lawyers to decide "when rules are broken" by elected officials, you give them power over those officials, and over voters.
Now that's okay to a degree, but the question is: where does the buck stop? If you design a system where the buck stops with lawyers and judges, then you've effectively given those lawyers and judges power to overrule voters. It's better to design a system where the lawyers and judges demur in situations like this, to avoid a "tail wagging the dog" situation where the legal system is invoked to resolve a political dispute.
> If you entrust judges and lawyers to decide "when rules are broken" by elected officials, you give them power over those officials, and over voters.
What you are describing is the judiciary in any functioning democracy. Separation of powers requires an independent judiciary system.
They have to be unelected, so they keep their independence when evaluating if the laws are being applied according to the written law.
> Now that's okay to a degree, but the question is: where does the buck stop?
With proper separation of powers and an independent justice system, like the one that judged Le Pen and found her guilty.
You seem to have failed to see the thorniness of the problem maybe because in the current instance (Le Pen's ban by the French judiciary) you agree with the outcome.
Probably impossible to separate Le Pen's disqualification from the situation in the U.S. It's the song of the day. I seem to recall some account arguing in 2020, nominally on their expertise as a lawyer, that the election result could not be determined except in the courtroom. If you asked in 2020, should lawyers be disgraced if not disbarred for attempting to nullify the election - answer from GOP would be no. When asked today, suddenly answer is yes.
I agree only in the sense that K think that politicians should be punished for their wrongs.
I would only see thorniness is the courts refused to punish Le Pen out of fear of punishing a somewhat popular politician, as this would embolden others to act in ways to break the rules, and would undermine the independence of the court, which is a core tenet of a functioning democracy.
I think you only see thorniness here because you wanted Le Pen to keep doing her thing. See? it works both ways.
That's why we have nowadays Republics, with either written constitutions or fundamental legal texts like Habeas Corpus, not just pure democracies à la antique Athens.
The way out of your conundrum is to admit there is no "the People"; there is a collection of diverging, often incoherent trends, and no voting system is perfect (no voting system is even logical, as proven by Condorcet and Arrow[0])
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/arrows-impossibility-th...
I'm using modern terminology. There's no relevant distinction here:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/democracy-and-republ...
The fundamental democratic principle is the same.
And we measure the will of the people in elections, without having to worry about Arrow... it's procedural.
Arrow is not at all "procedural", the French know it well: the 1995 presidential election ended with a Chirac vs Le Pen (the patriarch) duel, even though Lionel Jospin was the favorite and would have beaten both if he had faced them off... A clear example of non-transitivity in elections.
That's my point, sorry if it wasn't clear. Non-transitivity is resolved procedurally. We can theorize about Arrow all we want; in the meantime we can write rules that actually do produce electoral results.
My point is that it wasn't resolved: Jospin was the favorite, but the French were forced to choose between two candidates the majority of them loathed. The rules were a failure.
(2002 election, not 1995 - my bad)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_French_presidential_elect...
Sorry, 2002 election.
Even Athens had ostracism, barring ostracised people from running for office.
The definition of democracy according to Ricœur is: > Est démocratique, une société qui se reconnaît divisée, c’est-à-dire traversée par des contradictions d’intérêt et qui se fixe comme modalité, d’associer à parts égales, chaque citoyen dans l’expression de ces contradictions, l’analyse de ces contradictions et la mise en délibération de ces contradictions, en vue d’arriver à un arbitrage.
In English, more-or-less: > A society is democratic if it acknowledge that it is divided, which means that it contains contradictory interests, and if it creates modality to analyse and debate these contradictions so that we can reach arbitration, with each citizen having an equal share in the debate.
I don't believe that a society is democratic if a majority of the people have decided something that is harmful or unfair to a minority without properly having debated if this decision is fair or not for the minority.
Because of that, no, it's not "whatever the majority decides". In a democracy, the will to guarantee justice and fairness is more important than "the people", and if they say "there is suspicion of fraud from this candidate but let's just close our eyes because we like this person or because it is profitable for us", this is clearly a behavior where they are not trying to reach a just and fair situation.
This is what distinguish democracy from ochlocracy.
And I don't understand how people can really defend that we should ignore the justice/fairness condition: what is the point of following "the people" when these people are not trying to be just and fair? How will it be a good society?
> For democracy to work properly politicians need to follow the rules.
Democracy doesn't require that, except for a narrow subset of rules relating to voting and things like that.
The system you're describing isn't even democracy--it elevates lawyers and judges above the voters. Think about it: if there was a class of people you could trust to neutrally administer and enforce "the rules" then you wouldn't need multiple branches of government, separation of powers, etc. You could just make rules for everything, and trust the neutral arbiters to enforce those rules in politically neutral ways.
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The problem is when rules don't apply the same to all politicians.
That's a claim. You should back it up.
In the case of EU are there other politicians who embezzled funds that were let off the hook?
Here's one: Jacques Chirac was condemned in 2011 to 2 years with suspension (so, less than Le Pen) for something very similar (party members paid for fictitious jobs at the Mairie de Paris when he was mayor), and no ineligibility (so again, different consequences).
So it sounds like other politicians have indeed been convicted of similar things. The difference in punishment would then require you to examine the difference in the severity of the actions, which is beyond my pay grade.
Your example was of a politician being condemned. It seems that the system does work as intended after all.
As for the length of punishment, we would have to look in detail what each did.
Two murders may result is different length of imprisonment.
> It seems that the system does work as intended after all.
Does it though? One common thread in the comments here is whether ineligibility is or is not warranted in political embezzlement cases. If hers is justified, how is the lack of Chirac's justified? That he was not seeking to be elected?
Whether or not it's actually a politically motivated difference, it's not a stretch that people question whether it is. Because it's a very convenient sentence. And let's face it, she was very likely to make it to the second round of the presidential election, and I can totally see a number of people being extremely bothered that it was a possibility, because if it did happen, if she wouldn't have won, it would have been very close (although who knows, a miracle could happen, and the political field might be less of a mess in 2 years).
> If hers is justified, how is the lack of Chirac's justified? That he was not seeking to be elected?
As stated in another reply, being sentenced to ineligibility for embezzlement is only possible since 2017.
It simply wasn’t a possible sentence in 2011. Note that this is not because it was considered too harsh. Ineligibility was systematic before 2010 as anyone condemned for embezzlement was automatically removed from voting lists for five years. However this was judged unconstitutional in 2010 (because it was automatic and sentences have to be individualised, ineligibility in itself is fully constitutional).
I think you're wrong here. A law can't be applied retroactively except if it would benefit the defendant and the RN case is about facts that happened before 2017.
Chirac's case happened more than 3 decades ago. Perhaps the judiciary had a different understanding on the gravity of those crimes back then. Perhaps what Le Pen did was more serious.
If Le Pen won, or if she would make to the second round is meaningless. The election would be tainted by having her running. That people are burthurt that their pet right wing populist became ineligible is of no substance. If anything it proves the courts are independent, and not acting to please a subset of the people.
Unsurprising. The laws making ineligibility a sanction for embezzlement, “Lois pour la confiance dans la vie politique”, is from 2017.
Note also that the 2011 verdict was somewhat unusual because before 2010 when this was judged unconstitutional, Chirac condemnation would have led to him being removed from the voting list for five years and therefore de facto ineligible. Chirac was “lucky” to be sentenced during the seven years window when ineligibility wasn’t possible.
But the case is about actions that happened before 2017. I think you're mistaken on which law motivates the judges decision in this case.
Counterpoint: USA's presidential elections 2024.
I mean, "trust the electorate" sounds like a nice ideal, but I think it conveniently ignores the shithose of news and information that makes its way into the public discourse. We can't agree on basic facts in most places. What hope do we have to "trust the electorate" when most people are given straight propaganda and they buy it whole cloth.
If you want to live in the world where we "trust the electorate" you first have to figure out how to make the electorate informed. In the meantime, I would gladly accept equally applied and adjudicated laws as a way to remove corrupt individuals from the electable population. A lot of places do this already, so making it so someone can't run for a given election cycle seems like a relatively small slap on the wrist compared to barring felons from ever being allowed to vote or hold office.
They applied a law against corruption for which Le Pen herself voted. At some point, you need to trust the laws that elected members of parliament have enacted and also apply it to politicians.
Weird time in history to be a maximalist on trusting electorates.
At some level, yes. At the level of letting convicted criminals run for the highest office, no, that would be stupid.
> it should be easy to make that case to the electorate
It turns out if you have enough money for endless propaganda it is easy to make any case to the electorate. And who will be making the case anyway? The state cannot because it has to be inpartial in the elections; their opponents have a clear agenda (they want to be the president) so it's easy to dismiss their case. So that leaves no one with standing.
> If it's not that easy, then banning her from running is even worse.
If the result is that a convicted criminal will not be elected into the highest office of the state, that's not a worse outcome, that's a perfect outcome.
Allowing some people to be above the law is a bad idea in general. Selecting elected officials to be above the law in particularly is ill-thought-out, IMO. Perverse incentives abound . Elections shouldn't be a get-out-of-jail card.
You seem to deliberately ignore how easily people are manipulated. Just rulers have a responsibility to defend against that.
The marketplace of ideas as a primary political decision method was a dumb idea.
Well if that media is biased toward far-right they will push for disagreement.
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> The official position appears to be that a political party is given money by the EU but can only use it if they're pro-EU. A party that wishes the EU to be smaller or for their country to exit is then considered to be engaged in "national" politics rather than "European" politics, which makes their spending the money they were given as a political party, to do politics, "embezzlement".
No need for the scary quotation marks. This was plain embezzlement, as you very aptly described.
I disagree. Why should only EU positive parties get funding? Seems highly undemocratic to me.
Because it makes no sense for an institution to use funds to help those that want to see that institution dismantled.
Especially where the rhetoric for dismantling that institution already took Europe in a very dark path a century ago.
Yes, but it is bad for democracy if only one specific viewpoint, the viewpoint of the people in charge no less, is actively sponsored via taxes.
Sorry, but you are representing the “a dark path”, where power is concentrated in the hands of a few.
> Yes, but it is bad for democracy if only one specific viewpoint, the viewpoint of the people in charge no less, is actively sponsored via taxes.
And that is not what is happening. You can hold quite a lot of viewpoints, including opposing who is in charge. You just can't use EU funds to campaign for EU to be effectively abolished.
Imagine someone running for presidency in the US campaigning for it to disintegrate.
> Sorry, but you are representing the “a dark path”, where power is concentrated in the hands of a few.
Quite the opposite. EU fragments power so much that fucking Orban gets to block any initiative, even though Hungary is far from being one of the main countries in the block.
Also, very cute of you to cry authoritarianism when we are talking about Le Pen of all people, someone who holds very authoritarian views herself. Quite telling, whenever such a politician faces consequences of their bullshit, a lot of people come out of the woods to make excuses for them. Fuck that noise.
And why shouldn’t you be able to use EU funds for that? It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if a political organisation that is pro EU gets funding, the opponents should be funded as well. What is beneficial to the EU as a organisation shouldn’t be a parameter at all, that’s not how democracy works.
I agree that Marie Le Pen holds authoritarian views. When it comes to politicians this seems to be the rule rather than an exception. But that doesn’t make EU a particularly democratic organisation.
In my opinion, it is rare to find politicians who try to increase democracy.
Regarding your USA example, I believe it is only a nominally democratic state. I don’t think what they do over there is particularly good and should not be wused as a positive example.
I believe the best example of a functioning democracy is Switzerland.
> And why shouldn’t you be able to use EU funds for that? It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if a political organisation that is pro EU gets funding, the opponents should be funded as well. What is beneficial to the EU as a organisation shouldn’t be a parameter at all, that’s not how democracy works.
I fundamentally disagree with that. It would be like using public funds to run for presidency in a country while campaigning for that country to cease to exist.
Note that they didn't forbid her to campaign on a platform that is against the EU - which I think they should - they only forbid her to use public EU funds to do so.
That you want to paint this as undemocratic is very bizarre.
> But that doesn’t make EU a particularly democratic organisation.
To the opposite, EU fragments power quite a lot. It is one of the main reasons why it is slow to act sometimes, many changes requires unanimous approval from all member countries (which is why Orban gets to veto any initiative while he is gurgling on Putin's balls).
> In my opinion, it is rare to find politicians who try to increase democracy.
I don't even know if we would agree what a perfectly functioning democracy even is.
> It would be like using public funds to run for presidency in a country while campaigning for that country to cease to exist.
You seem to think this is an absurd scenario - I don't know how to tell you this, but it's not. It's allowed in healthy democracies. To give just three contemporary European examples:
1. In the UK the Scottish National Party gets public money for being in Parliament, yet has the stated goal that the UK should cease to exist. SNP MPs aren't thrown in prison or banned from politics. That's because the UK is a democracy.
2. Flanders has independence parties that poll highly and take part in regular politics without being banned from Belgian politics.
3. MEPs themselves are frequently arch Euro-nationalists. They get public money and then campaign to effectively abolish the countries they represent, demanding their national governments be replaced by the EU institutions. This is of course not considered illegal.
Whilst there are regions that criminalize attempts to actually become independent (which they shouldn't), even they typically don't criminalize merely being in favor of it.
> Note that they didn't forbid her to campaign on a platform that is against the EU - which I think they should - they only forbid her to use public EU funds to do so.
She's been banned from politics entirely and given a prison sentence. That meets the threshold for something being forbidden.
It honestly sounds like you'd have been happy with all the other attempts to unite Europe under a single government that happened in the 20th century. Not only are you delighted by this clearly despotic move, you think it should be illegal to even be against the EU at all: a purist argument for the EU as totalitarian dictatorship. You should really think about whether that's the place you want to be, philosophically. Especially as frustration over the EU's undemocratic approach was the primary reason the UK left.
> 1. In the UK the Scottish National Party gets public money for being in Parliament, yet has the stated goal that the UK should cease to exist. SNP MPs aren't thrown in prison or banned from politics. That's because the UK is a democracy.
SNP is a very particular case in that Scotland is a country, and the UK is a country made up of countries.
Also, Scotland is not trying to abolish the UK, it would still be a United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Northen Ireland.
> 2. 2. Flanders has independence parties that poll highly and take part in regular politics without being banned from Belgian politics.
Again, you are speaking of a portion of a country that desires independence. This is not the same as abolishing the country. Belgium would not cease to exist.
I could bring up movements that desire the separation of Catalonia and Basque Country in Spain too.
> 3. MEPs themselves are frequently arch Euro-nationalists. They get public money and then campaign to effectively abolish the countries they represent, demanding their national governments be replaced by the EU institutions. This is of course not considered illegal.
Replacing national institutions with more EU integration is not trying to abolish the existence of that country. You are extrapolating something there in a weird slippery slope.
> She's been banned from politics entirely and given a prison sentence. That meets the threshold for something being forbidden.
Perhaps she should not have engaged in embezzlement. Good that she was banished. It is important to respect the rules in place, else they become irrelevant and more politicians would feel emboldened to break them.
> It honestly sounds like you'd have been happy with all the other attempts to unite Europe under a single government that happened in the 20th century.
Nice way to try to paint me as a Nazi while you are crying about Le Pen of all people.
Protip, I am not the Nazi in this conversation.
> Not only are you delighted by this clearly despotic move, you think it should be illegal to even be against the EU at all: a purist argument for the EU as totalitarian dictatorship.
EU is far from being totalitarian, and far from being a dictatorship. If it was we wouldn't have to handle Orban being a pain in the ass for every initiative.
In fact, it is so democratic that things move slooooowly, because it needs a lot of consensus for things to move forward. It's a price I agree to pay, even if Orban is the cost for it.
> You should really think about whether that's the place you want to be, philosophically.
I am very much in favor of more EU integration, and I certainly vote for pro EU politiciand and parties for that matter. EU federalization should be the goal for me.
> Especially as frustration over the EU's undemocratic approach was the primary reason the UK left.
And that worked super well for the UK lol.
Are other parties allowed to use the funds for staffers and was it considered embezzlement in this case based on a determination of party policy?
If so, this seems crazy to me.
There have been other cases like this one yes, the EU fined UKIP for the same reason iirc. UKIP of course was a party that had only one policy: getting Britain out of the EU. Therefore any political activity by them was considered illegal under this policy.
In other cases the same things have been done without fines, I think, e.g. the German Greens. Because their policies align with the Commission their campaigning in Germany isn't considered "embezzlement".
The basic issue the EU has is that the Parliament isn't actually a Parliament. It's not genuinely the legislative branch because it can't change the law, which is the dictionary definition of Parliament. As a consequence it fills up with anti EU parties put there as a protest vote. These parties then want to spend their time advocating against the EU back home which is embarrassing to the EU as there is no other so-called Parliament in the world with so many members who think it shouldn't exist. These kinds of legal actions were conventionally about that.
This one has gone further because it's a way for the left to continue locking down mass immigration policies. Although you will read that Le Pen is far right in reality she is a classical left wing socialist with the policies typical of such a person, she is just against the EU and its migration policies. It's a purely ideological action, hence the ankle bracelet.
> This one has gone further because it's a way for the left to continue locking down mass immigration policies. Although you will read that Le Pen is far right in reality she is a classical left wing socialist with the policies typical of such a person, she is just against the EU and its migration policies. It's a purely ideological action, hence the ankle bracelet.
You are absolutely delusional.
This is on the same ballpark of the argument some brain damaged people repeat that the NSDAP was leftist because it had "socialist" in the party name.
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> That post was for the Americans who are waking up about now.
You are just trying to excuse a plain case of embezzlement by dressing up as authoritarianism. Good that a cheater such as Le Pen is removed from elections. If democracy allows cheaters to run, that is shortcut to disaster.
Were Le Pen able to win an election without embezzlement of EU funds, I would agree she is as popular as you claim.
> And to the people who call themselves "European citizens", I would say this: you can build a positive, shared European identity without the EU.
As someone that lives in an EU country, I fully disagree. Even the largest EU countries are relatively small for the world stage. Consider that Germany has the population of Chinese provinces.
EU is an absurdly positive to every country involved, to the point where I actively desire further integration. Federalization of Europe should be the goal, not less integration.
> The average rock concert does more for long term European integration than any EU regulation because the EU is not Europe and Europe is not the EU. The EU is a transient political arrangement, one that is by now actually working against true European integration.
And this is the point where I come to conclusion you are arguing in bad faith.
> The path it's on leads to ever harsher authoritarianism.
Funny you mention this when you are crying about Le Pen and fucking AfD.
Yeah, nothing authoritarian from those people. It is the EU that is truly authoritarian. Sure.
Fuck that noise.
Far-left politician and fierce Le Pen critic Jean-Luc Mélenchon condemned the decision: https://twitter.com/JLMelenchon/status/1906673335796146412
(His party is under investigation for the same crime. The Prime Minister’s party was also investigated, got off with a simple fine)
It's hardly a condemnation... They reiterated that they consider the accusations to be very serious, and are not casting doubt or whether the decision is unjust. They do emit doubts about the timing of it, but for political gains.
Mélenchon's strategy has been for a while to get voters from both the ghettos and from Le Pen's pool of supposedly unhappy but not racist voters. That's again what they're doing here: painting themselves as more respectable [0] than the far right while shitting on Macron / the current establishment.
[0] As opposed to the far right, their ranks aren't filled with people who have been convicted for antisemitism, and the sheer amount of fraud cases in there also speaks for itself...
> They do emit doubts about the timing of it
What's wrong with the timing? Isn't the election in 2027?
It makes her ineligible for that election
Yes, but it's not as if Le Pen has been nominated and there is a week until the election. If 'bad timing' is any time in the 5 years before, the term becomes meaningless.
> The Prime Minister’s party was also investigated, got off with a simple fine
Untrue. Seven people were condemned to jail time and made ineligible in the MoDem trial.
They STOLE 4 millions for f-sake ! AND it's not even the first time; they got away easy until this time.
They also have been frothing hard for decades about the leniency of the courts and how utterly honest they were compared to the others ... I guess its only relevant as long as they're not concerned. Incredible.
The law has been applied fair and square. Period.
Personally, I believe that in a democracy, courts shouldn’t have the power to disqualify individuals from running for office. That’s just my opinion, though, and I’m not familiar with the situation in France.
Separately, here in the U.S., I take issue with the fact that ex-felons are denied the right to vote. I believe we should push for a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to vote for every U.S. citizen—regardless of their criminal record or other issues.
If it's been proven that a politician will cheat democracy, how is banning them from running for office a bad thing? And who should decide that if not the courts?
How would that be any different than banning someone from running a company after they've been found guilty of fraud or any other way of breaking the law about how to run companies?
If they've been proven unable to follow the law, they shouldn't be able to be elected.
As some extra context here, the judge mentioned that she was totally recognizing how heavy the situation was. But she mentioned a few things:
- it's been found that it was all part of a system designed from the very top of the party (so MLP) to embezzle money
- it's been noted that during the entire procedure, all the defendants showed complete denial of the facts and no will to accept that they did something bad
As such she pointed out that they was a high risk that they would do it again, and that's what tipped the scale in favor of banning them right away. I agree with that.
My concern is that courts can become corrupted or influenced by those in power, which creates a serious problem. While courts should have the authority to issue sentences—like prison terms—they shouldn’t be the ones deciding who the public is allowed to vote for.
If people want to vote for someone, that’s their democratic right. And if they make a mistake, they’ll learn from the consequences. But the decision should ultimately rest with the voters, not the courts.
That argument makes sense in most cases. If the candidate is a rapist, voters can and should be the ones to disqualify them.
But this is a case of cheating. If a candidate cheats in an election, that should disqualify them because otherwise the election is tainted.
This is an embezzlement case. No-one tampered with election results, so can you explain how there is any logic to your argument?
They used the money on the election campaign.
All I have seen is that four people worked for the party while being paid by the EU. Nothing like routing money to advertising campaigns or anything that would actually swing an election. And the headlines are all about embezzlement, not election fraud. So this seems like a stretch.
I read that 9 European representatives, plus 12 assistants, plus 4 other members of the party were found guilty as part of a scheme to earn illegally EUR 2.9M for the party.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_des_assistants_parleme...
In my experience, boots on the ground are far more effective at affecting election outcomes than advertising campaigns are.
Go and congratulate Kamala for her win against Trump.
This is just the latest example showing how wrong your take is.
So lets say you have a 6 sided die and you have two options.
1. You win when a 1 is rolled
2. You win when a 1 or a 2 is rolled
Despite both of the situations being less than 50% the 2nd one is still more effective.
(Also your comment implies Trump's campaign doesn't have boots on the ground which obviously isn't true ...)
Say the person who the public vote for is in prison (and to make it "easier", prior to running for office. Or maybe they were a write-in).
That decision should lie with the voters, you say.
So which takes precedence? Prison, where they are serving a sentence? Or the democratic role?
After all, the same public, using their democratic rights, voted for a system in which that person was sentenced to prison.
So which vote is more important? The vote that says that "X is a crime, and if you are justly convicted, the sentence is Y"? Or the vote that says "If I want you to be our leader, that's more important than that previous application of justice"?
The appeals process is the standard here.
You aren’t the first person to have the thought you are expounding above.
"If they've been proven unable to follow the law, they shouldn't be able to be elected."
Because it gives incumbents a strong incentive to try influencing the courts against their opponents.
I believe - yes, it is my opinion only - that existence of such incentives and a temptation to act upon them is, in the long run, more dangerous to democracy than allowing felons into elections.
People respond to incentives. If we know anything at all about human behavior, it is that people respond to incentives. And there is no shiny nice wall separating democracies from authoritarian states. Countries slide along the scale, and they can absolutely slide in the wrong direction.
Only one political party, namely, the far right, has argued that the courts should be politicized and used to punish their political opponents.
This is super dangerous “both sides”-ism.
Only one side is trying to do what you think “those in power” do.
Nazis will argue up and down about their right to free speech, right up until the moment they are in power. And guess what happens then?
I come from a former Communist country and the far left in power twisted justice beyond any recognition. We had the "pleasure" being occupied by the Nazis and then ruled by the Stalinists and the bothside-ism is absolutely spot on, because these two systems are like evil brothers.
And as for France, that is why I don't trust Mélenchon any more than Le Pen, and they have 50 per cent of voters between them. Two far-somethings don't make a democracy.
Neither the Nazis, nor Stalinists even remotely approximate the modern left in the US, or elsewhere.
The debate is effectively between classical Liberalism, and authoritarianism/patromonialism/fascism.
Forget what people called themselves: the peoples republic of North Korea certainly isn’t a republic.
Socialist Left/Capitalist Right is an outdated dichotomy that is only in service of authoritarians.
> If it's been proven that a politician will cheat democracy, how is banning them from running for office a bad thing?
You just answer your own question!
Since politicians will cheat democracy, they will use the system to ban people running for office that threaten their power.
Judges sitting in those courts are not politicians elected to take decisions weighted by how their constituents will like them and reelect them, but people who've studied law and its application (unlike politicians who can be anyone), who have been vetted by peers for their capacity to be law "technicians", and whose job is to "apply" the law, whether they disagree with it or not.
That's the concept of the separation of powers. Of course judges will have opinions and can never truly be objective (no such thing exists anyway), but their main job is to apply the law. And the concept of appeal and (in France) "cassation", which meana judgment can be revised up to two times, are there so that no single judge ruling can be definitive in isolation.
If politicians can use the judicial system to ban political opponents, the system is broken and powers are not separated in the right way. And I'll definitely not say that France has a perfect separation (the president concentrate a lot more than it should), but it's still there and this wasn't such a case (in the past two years, Le Pen and the RN is the group that Macron has been willingly compromising with and letting arbitrate a lot of stuff)
"been proven" by who?
There is no final arbitrator that is above all others.
Liberal democracies are build on the principle that no institution is beyond corruption. That's why they build systems based on separation of powers and checks and balances.
(1) Courts should be independent, because executive branch can be corrupt and law-making branch (voters and their representatives) don't always want to follow the laws they set up.
(2) Law making branch (elections, representatives) should be immune from courts and executive branch messing with them. Lawmakers have immunity from courts and executive. Courts and executive branch should not be able to limit candidates too much.
(3) Executive branch should execute laws, but not allowed to make them. Courts should keep the executive branch in check and have at least some immunity form it.
It's all balancing acts. Different countries have different balances.
> And who should decide that if not the courts?
We could trust voters to take that into the account when making decision who to vote.
> Liberal democracies are build on the principle that no institution is beyond corruption.
It's an ontological issue, if everyone is potentially compromised, how do you know anything ? It's also leveraged by biased medias to discredit old institutions and suddenly no more counter powers..
It's the core of liberal democracy.
It's the pragmatic acknowledgment that human fallibility necessitated institutional safeguards against the concentration of power. Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu, came up with it.
> It's an ontological issue, if everyone is potentially compromised, how do you know anything ?
You just made a strong case for freedom of speech and free press.
>> courts shouldn’t have the power to disqualify individuals from running for office.
Why would you want that? Didn't history teach us better?
>> Separately, here in the U.S., I take issue with the fact that ex-felons are denied the right to vote
Well, ex-felons can become Potus, so that's that.
> Why would you want that?
I don't have a strong opinion on it wither way, but the GP's opinion seems totally reasonable to me.
Why shouldn't the public be able to elect whoever they want? If the courts can block candidates before they run, the courts can effectively circumvent checks and balances before the person could be elected.
> Didn't history teach us better?
I'm not sure what you're referring to here, help me out. What examples of history show the universal downsides when courts can't disqualify potential candidates?
>Why shouldn't the public be able to elect whoever they want?
Because some types of illegal behaviour of candidates can influence the vote.
This isn't about a court banning MLP because of her views or policy proposals (that would be very bad) but because she has been show to have comitted fraud by abusing EU money to pay for her own party.
Unlike in the US there are strict rules in France about how much politicians can spend on campainging and where the funds can come from that are intended to ensure a level playing field rather than favouring rich candidates.
If courts couldn't ban candidates who don't respect the rules then elections could be "bought" illegaly.
Sure, I'm not attempting to comment specifically on French laws, I don't know French laws nearly well enough.
The comment I relied to was talking about judicial powers in general, and referenced the US rather than France.
My point really isn't specific to any one country though. If an electoral system is meant to be democratic, IMO people should be able to vote for whomever they want. If a candidate can get enough support to win, so be it.
That doesn't preclude us from having laws protecting our right to free and fair elections though. A candidate will absolutely influence the vote, that's the candidate's whole job. There has to be lines drawn where it goes from campaigning to impeding a democratic election, I wasn't arguing against that.
What's ex- about it? Presently still convicted, unless I missed an appeal?
Anyway POTUS is likely the only job a convicted felon can get.
Illinois / NJ governor?
Agreed, my bad.
>> Why would you want that? Didn't history teach us better?
Once you give the courts the power to disqualify candidates you open the door to massive potential for political witch hunts with the express goal of disqualifying the opposition.
Since the executive branch effectively controls the justice department, this is a pretty scary thought.
At least in France, the courts are independent of the executive.
Exactly. Very telling that this appears to need explicit mentioning.
Thanks for this context! Pretty pivotal piece of info.
If a court isn't independent of the executive, something is very seriously wrong (see Poland)
To be clear, in the US the justice department is under the exec branch. The courts themselves are further disconnected.
It is the same in France, the courts are independent in principle, while prosecutors remain under executive control but since 2013 they should not give orders on individual cases.
France has an additional layer of independence compared to the U.S. because of the juge d’instruction (investigating judge), who is also supposed to be independent from the executive, unlike prosecutors.
I say in principle because, judges are appointed in France and not elected. The executive as some control through appointments and career advancements but they are not supposed to use it to sanction or reward the judges.
The effectiveness of these independence mechanisms remains a subject of active debate, as evidenced by the relatively recent changes made to them.
Courts already have the power to fine and jail people.
The problem is not the power. The problem is the politicisation.
I've always been of the opinion that a power shouldn't be granted if it can be abused so easily.
Its unreasonable to say powers should never be abusable, but it isn't hard for a political system to become politicized. That shouldn't be all it takes.
That's the thing about the nature of power -- it's not really power if it can't be easily abused. That's why with great power, comes great responsibility. Responsibility would not be needed if the power couldn't be abused.
At the end of the day if someone has the ability to prevent you from using your power, they are the ones who actually have power. So who watches the watchmen?
The US tries to solve this conundrum by making the checks on power a self-reinforcing circle. "Checks and balances". But at the end of the day, the Constitution is just a piece of paper, and all it takes to abuse power once given to you is to convince yourself you have the right.
We can diffuse the power so much that not one person can abuse it. But that has the problem of making action so impossible that the power is never used and nothing gets done. Equally problematic.
That's why it's so important to elect people of high character. Most politicians fail this test.
I think we agree here in general. For me the risk is too high when only one person can abuse power in a meaningful way with little or no check on that authority. I put most executive branch powers (in the US) on that list - the president was meant to largely be a figurehead only executing on what the legislative branch passed and the courts haven't found unconstitutional.
> That's why it's so important to elect people of high character. Most politicians fail this test.
I'd say we have failed to build a system that incentivizes anyone of high character to run for office.
The exchange of power, including consolidation and fragmentation of power, is politics.
Courts give orders, but the coercive powers of fines and incarceration are administrative. At the federal level, and the few states I'm familiar with, these are executive branch powers.
To whatever degree the founders were deeply flawed people, they understood power quite well. They didn't create a democracy as much as they created a polyarchy. Their interest was to make ambitions compete. Ambition to counter ambition.
They were most concerned by consolidated power. Monarchy. For obvious reasons.
"Politicization" is just politics, which is nothing more than how human interact when it comes to gaining power.
Your problem is with human nature - it's not going to change.
We'll never have a system where we find "good humans" who don't have the urge to win by any means necessary. So you need to devise a system that makes that as hard as possible.
Everything has the potential to be a slippery slope. That potential doesn't seem like a good reason to abandon the idea of standards for our leaders.
The problem is tying this to the category of felony, which is too broad of a category.
Someone who committed something heinous like felony assault, there’s still an easy argument to be made that they should be allowed to both run for office and vote.
But if someone was guilty of some kind of corruption, bribery, taking bribes, spying, insurrection, treason, organized crime, violating their oath of office, or anything else that suggests they are not going to serve with the best interests of their constituents and the world at heart, they should absolutely not be allowed to run for office, and maybe should not be allowed to vote.
This is Separation of Power Issue and not a clear cut issue. The principle is that Law, Law-making, and executive-power should be separated.
It's really who you trust more: courts or the people.
1. French law recognizes that French people are not trusted to weigh in the conviction properly, and the court sentences put limits to how can and can't run.
2. On the other hand, corrupting of the courts would prevent correcting the system by voting. If the courts are corrupt all hope is lost.
> 2. On the other hand, corrupting of the courts would prevent correcting the system by voting. If the courts are corrupt all hope is lost.
Just last week a turkish court arrested the mayor of Istanbul under similar "corruption" charges. He happens to be the most popular opposition politician challenging Erdogan.
EDIT: forgot to mention that recently Romanian supreme court canceled the elections altogether because the current government did not like the guy who won the first round. And of course he is not allowed to run in the rerun of the elections. People's votes do not seem to count any longer.
The Romanian justice system didn’t rule the candidate out because “the current government didn’t like him”.
Where do you get your information, Fox News?
It was because of grievous breaches of campaign financing. The kind of thing that brings the integrity of their electoral system at serious risk.
It's relevant that the corruption charges against Erdoğan's opponent are obviously trumped-up, whereas the ones against Le Pen are entirely legitimate.
Kinda, sometimes politicians gets elected, and tear down the courts who could say against them. Belarus was a democracy for a short time, until the future dictator ordered SWAT team to throw out members of parliament who wanted his impeachment. Then several of them disappeared forever, others got the message. And the democracy ended.
Donald Trump is in the process of doing this right now. Law firms that worked with the prosecution of many of his cases are being actively pressured. In some cases they are being banned from government owned buildings, banned from lists of law firms the federal government may hire and having security clearances revoked.
I think Democrats are doing a disservice by not pushing back harder against Trump’s attacks on judges and his calls for their impeachment. The judiciary is one of the few remaining institutions that can check executive overreach, and defending it should be a top priority.
More broadly, I believe Democrats would gain much more support if they focused on a few key issues—ones that have broad consensus and appeal to independents—and pursued them with laser focus. Instead, they tend to chase after every single distraction Trump throws their way, which only plays into his strategy.
There is separation of powers: The legislature made the law, the executive enforces it, the courts interpet it. The legislature is more responsible than the courts, IMHO.
The real responsible person is Marine Le Pen: Don't commit crimes and you won't have these problems.
The temporary loss of the right to stand for election is a common punishment in France when politicians are convicted of corruption and breach of trust.
I don't think anyone is questioning whether it's legal, simply whether it's right or ideologically consistent with people who claim to be pro-democracy.
Do you believe that non-citizens should be allowed to run for any office? Or that citizens living outside a state/district should be allowed to represent that state/distict? If not, courts and/or election officials must have the power to disqualify individuals. As long as there are any legal requirements for a candidate, someone must make the final decision on whether a potential candidate fulfills the requirements.
> Separately, here in the U.S., I take issue with the fact that ex-felons are denied the right to vote.
You have a _CURRENT_ felon serving as POTUS.
Strawman. "right to vote" != "right to be elected"
Good thing Florida exempted Trump from their "convicted felons can't vote" laws, too, huh?
Oh, it's Trump, they said, well, yes, he has been convicted, but because a sentence has not been imposed or completed he's akshualllly not reallly a felon... yet.
All the inmates in Florida prisons whose sentences have not been completed were very surprised to learn they were still eligible to vote.
Except, no, this is just for Trump.
We all know that American democracy is a sad broken joke, but this piece of news is about France, which seems to have a functioning one.
We should look at the whole legal framework, maybe it's part of the check and balances between the executive, legislative and judicial powers.
If your crime is so heinous as to come with life-long punishment, you should be in prison for life. If the idea of putting someone in prison for life for a particular crime makes you take pause, perhaps they shouldn't have any life-long punishment for that crime. This includes all Constitutionally-protected rights: voting, gun rights, whatever one you want to pick.
Conversely, if there are so many prisoners or the disenfranchised that, in a democracy, they can sway elections and drive policy, isn't that a sign there's something wrong with the system, e.g. disenfranchisement and prison is being used as a weapon against parts of the population? Denying them the vote means the system is that much harder to fix.
On the other hand, if only those who really deserve it lose their right to vote (i.e. a small fraction of the population), then it doesn't really matter if they can vote or not - their small numbers mean they won't make a difference. But the benefit is that disenfranchisement can no longer be used as a political weapon.
You shouldn't be able to vote if you are actively in prison on the day of the election. Or maybe cases like house arrest. But if we say that you're able to be walking around in society with us, including probation/parole, you should have all the rights that others have.
It doesn't come with life-long punishment. She's banned from public office for five years (immediate), and jailed for four years (won't come into effect until after the appeal).
I'm just talking about felons in the US who have served their time in incarceration and finished parole/probation/supervised release being denied multiple rights for the rest of their lives.
That’s actually up to each state. For example in my home state you can vote once you’ve served your term and any probation.
In this case an appeal would normally suspend the verdict so the judge in effect specifically decided to prevent her from running for President by imposing immediate effect on a verdict that isn't final.
No doubt that this will only strengthen the claims that this is politically motivated, and the timing is obviously very "interesting"... So unclear how this will play out in public opinion and polls.
Ex-felons should be allowed to vote.
Felons shouldn't be eligible for political positions though.
That's how democracy works in Europe: the courts are part of the checks and ballances, politicians have to be transparent about campaign financing so that we hopefully don't get Uncle Adolph running the show again, needing Allied intervention again and bombs dropped on innocent people and beer factories.
Le Pen's case is similar to Sarkozy takng a briefcase of cash from Gaddafi to finance hus campaign (and then waging war agsinst him) but it's more nuanced, because instead she used EU funds when Putin's funding dried up due to the need to finance his war. So basically she should probably be in the same place that Sarkozy is now or wherever the court will decide based on evidence.
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Just as in Romania ( and hopefully someday in Hungary ) these people "against the EU" are the ones channeling millions from the EU into their pockets.
And after all that they even become "martyrs" because everyone is corrupt and against them.
Not a fan of the immediate effect on part of the sentence (everything should be contingent on the result of the appeal process).
There is a very real risk of political candidates committing political fraud, getting elected thanks to it, and putting pressure on the judiciary branch to lower their chances of getting arrested. We're seeing this exact process happen in real time in the US. Every modern country pretends that nobody is above the law and that bad people will get convicted and get sentences but in real life the government has power over this stuff.
Making ineligibility sentences immediate is a way to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen.
It's also a way for someone to make their own re-election (or the continued control of their party) easier by "putting pressure on the judiciary branch" as you said to find their opponent guilty.
Take the individual parties of today out of it. You don't want the party in power in the government to have the ability to decide who is allowed to run for office. If you actually want to live in a democracy and not just autocracy with your favored party in power, you want the people to decide who runs with as little government input as possible.
A judge saying someone is not allowed to run for office is objectively, by definition, anti-democratic.
> We're seeing this exact process happen in real time in the US.
Last I checked Rosie O'Donnell is only one stupid enough to imply that the latest presidential election was not completely above board.
> by "putting pressure on the judiciary branch" as you said to find their opponent guilty.
In a court of law in the US, a jury decides whether someone is guilty or not guilty in criminal cases.
I know that, I'm just saying that if you can "put pressure on the judiciary" (which is a ridiculous statement in most western countries but especially France) to find someone not guilty, you can certainly do it to find them guilty.
The information the jury hears in the US in criminal cases, especially high profile ones, is extremely tightly controlled. They're not in the room when lawyers are making evidentiary arguments to include or exclude evidence. I've served on a couple juries and the most high-stakes one carried potentially decades of jail time for the defendant. We were shuffled in and out of that room dozens of times each day for lawyers to make arguments about what we could or could not hear. Several of our questions during deliberation were answered with a section of the transcript and nothing more.
Juries are wrong all the time.
Just so it’s clear, jury trials in France are limited to criminal cases. The trial considered here is a civil law one. No jury was involved.
> Last I checked Rosie O'Donnell is only one stupid enough to imply that the latest presidential election was not completely above tye board.
The MAGA cult was complaining about it until it became obvious they did not lose the elections.
Well, it’s quite common in France, especially for the particular activities one was convicted of engaging in (barred from politics for embezzlement of political funds, not allowed to trade equities if convicted of insider trading, etc. ) and even more common if the convicted person shows defiance of the courts, lack of cooperation, etc.
Make no mistake: this is completely standard and of LePen’s own doing.
Anyone telling you otherwise is either at best completely ignorant of French jurisprudence and the factual details of the case, or, at worse, intentionally deceiving you.
While not versed in French law or their view of personal liberties, from an American lens, this seems fine. Barring running from public office could be reversible on appeal and that stipulation isn’t irreversible—you could run after the ban is reversed—, so it’s not depriving you of something significant enough that that should rise to a level of stricter scrutiny.
The prison sentence being suspended until appeals are exhausted also seems sane to me for a nonviolent crime.
So, overall, it seems reasonable. The ban on a run isn’t infringing on fundamental rights in a way that is permanent and there’s no deprivation of liberty until appeals are exhausted.
As long as it's not a death sentence (and we don't want those), all sentences should be immediate. If everything hinges on an (another) appeal, where does it end?
You have discovered why the rich do not go to jail and the poor do.
Not remotely a fan of Marine LePen or her politics, even if she's become more moderate in recent years, but this will make her a martyr and empower her.
She can spend the next five years campaigning on how the establishment is trying to shut her down. These judges love own goals, no one should be barred from running for office of a country they're a citizen of. To me, it feels like overreach of un-elected judges.
The Judges impose the punishment set out in the law; they don't make this stuff up.
The alternative is Judges letting people off just because they're politicians. That seems like an extremely poor precedent to set, those in political life should be held to higher standards.
I didn't say letting someone of, a crime has been committed and the person should be punished. But forbidding someone from running from office? I don't think that should be the power of the judiciary. That should be the power and responsibility of the electorate (to not vote for them).
You do understand that this is explicitly mandated by the law and only in special cases can this be lifted (and here the judge mentioned the lack of remorse or admission from the defendant was a deciding factor for this)? Here is a reference for that: https://www.vie-publique.fr/questions-reponses/297965-inelig...
And why are your feelings relevant to the French legal system?
Why are you hallucinating feelings? Also, appeal to authority. ("Why are your feelings relevant to the wizarding laws of Hogwarts?")
There are all kinds of eligibility rules, you think they shouldn't exist?
By your logic, Trump should be allowed to run for a 3rd term right?
>> Trump should be allowed to run for a 3rd term right?
From the 25th Amendment:
"No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."
Trump might not be able to "be elected to the office of the President" again, but he could run as a temporary Vice President and then the President could resign, allowing Trump to serve another term, for example.
Of course the 12th Amendment says, "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States", but the 25th Amendment doesn't say a two-term President is ineligible to the office of President, it says he can't "be elected to the office of President".
The Supreme Court recently decided that a law prohibiting false statements did not prohibit misleading statements. If the legislators had wanted to prohibit misleading statements, they would have prohibited false and misleading statements, not just false ones. Words matter to them.
And there are many other possibilities for creative types.
As far as the French eligibility rules go, would you be comfortable with a system where anyone who Trump's DOJ can get a conviction on is ineligible to run for office, with no right of appeal on that holding? That would be a really terrible incentive.
Not only Trump. Without the rules, Musk or Putin could run as well, the latter even work-from-home style. Also, if justice being blind is so bad before an election, why not after? Figuring out who won shouldn't involve any courts either. The public will just need to figure out who really won for themselves!
(/s just in case)
Marine Le Pen herself stated a few years ago that corrupt politicians should be banned from running for office for life.
I'm sure that her meaning changed in the last few hours.
No, the OTHER corrupt politicians!
Could you provide the quote?
I'm not sure how good a look "they imposed consequences for my stealing a measly 4 million euro of taxpayer money" is for a populist politician, tbh.
Like I mean I'm sure her core followers will be able to explain it away, but for a broader populist appeal it doesn't seem great.
> this will make her a martyr and empower her.
The US Supreme Court and Congress decided to allow Donald Trump to run in 2024, choosing not to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment against him. As you can see today, this resulted in Donald Trump not being empowered.
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/trump-v-anderson...
Can't someone else run as a stand-in? Are voters so stupid that the stand-in would poll worse than Le Pen despite her party's victim advantage?
Disclaimer: I don't support Le Pen. I also don't support banning her from running, but it's harder for me to understand and argue why I feel that way. I think it's a combination of:
- If people would elect a "bad" leader, disqualifying them delays the problem. They'll eventually elect another bad leader or revolt. Unless the bad candidate is only popular for a temporary reason, but that may not always be the case.
- Disqualifying someone because they broke a law is bad, because anyone can be "breaking a law"; every nation has many laws and they can be misinterpreted. Related: the situation in Turkey.
- Counterpoint: a self-interested party will disqualify whoever they want. But written laws (even guidelines) matter in the long-term because borderline party-supporters need justification to stay supportive, and people revert to laws. See: countries (like Turkey and Russia) using laws to justify banning candidates instead of "because we said so".
Keeping the rules simple (e.g. "anyone can run for office, whoever gets the most votes wins") makes it harder for an adversary to break them while retaining support. Keeping Democracy makes it more likely that an "adversary" will lose power, because such parties tend to become unpopular. If Democracy leads to a "bad" party consistently winning, why have it?
In fact, maybe it's necessary for a Democracy to have a "really bad" candidate win every once in a while, so people know what is bad. Then, the approach people should take is to ensure that the leader can't make rapid, far-reaching changes, so they can't ruin Democracy or people's lives in a single term. Just far-reaching enough for people to realize they made a mistake; then regular elections should be frequent, or there should be a quick way to get a snap election, so the bad leader is replaced.
> I also don't support banning her from running, but it's harder for me to understand and argue why I feel that way
Here she is advocating for life ineligibility for politicians found guilty of crimes when elected: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9h38r0
5 years is less than what she advocates for so she should be happy
She allowed the law to pass by not voting against. There was enough abstention for her voice to matter.
She stole money from the EU, an act she did after being voted MP. She couldn’t have done it if she had not been elected. So, basically she was elected, stole money and she still should not be barred from the next presidential election after she allowed that ban law to be voted?
She chose the path, she should face the consequences.
While yes, this is happening to someone many really don't like, the optics of this look very bad. And, for those who dislike this particular politician who might be celebrating now, this is much more so bad news than it is good news.
At the end of the day, when we select our leaders to represent us, we seem to have forgotten that a big part of it should be about about the ethics, principles, character, and judgement of the individual.
If someone on "my side" was found guilty of embezzlement or fraud -- through due process in a court of law with sufficient evidence that there was no path of appeal -- then I have ZERO problems denouncing the individual and would celebrate their punishment.
This is the fundamental problem with the left in the US: the standards for ethics, principles, judgement, and character are simply higher and the left will more readily fault candidates for even small lapses while the right has no such qualms.
The whole 34 felony thing is not the one and only thing that cost the dems the election, but it's one of the major things. That, and the fine people hoax. They managed to float that one for a while. But: what goes up, must come down.
Same story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43533857
Really don't like this. It's smacks of corruption. I don't really care for Le Pen, she's not a good candidate, but the court should not be allowed to suspend someone from running for office. That's the voters job.
False, it's simply a requirement.
French law explicitly states that a candidate for an election must not be ineligible by reason of criminal conviction or judicial decision.
Should have thought about messing with EU funds before, I suppose.
> French law explicitly states that a candidate for an election must not be ineligible by reason of criminal conviction or judicial decision.
Then French law needs to change; it's simply a requirement.
Because some people on HN who most likely are neither French nor lawyers say so?
Prosecuting people for corruption is corruption?
Wait, so she's in prison of embezzlement? Are people claiming this is a fake charge, or are they saying that it's ok with them?
I think they’re saying that if voters want her, voters should be able to get her.
Then they'll have to wait until she has finished her sentence and in the mean time think about it.
Weird this was flagged. This is important to EU hackers.
YC and PG think they are going to be able to escape the worst of what is to come by appeasing the far right in advance.
Narrator: they were horribly wrong.
No it's not
As a French person, I can say that this situation will unfold the same way as it did for Trump.
Jordan Bardella is going to take her place and most likely win in 2027. He is well liked by people, he is young and he doesn't have a political legacy. In some polls, they floated his name as a replacement if she was unable to run and he polled 10% + ahead of all his rivals in the first round giving him a very good chance to actually win the run off.
This is exactly how Macron won in 2017 (no political baggage, young) and despite his vows to crush the far right he never managed to do it. Even worse, the far right is far stronger now than it was 8 years ago.
The justice system gave the far right a martyr and that is something that they will use for campaigning.
> Jordan Bardella is going to take her place and most likely win in 2027. He is well liked by people, he is young and he doesn't have a political legacy.
Considering Bardella past debating performance, this seems highly unlikely to me. The RN always polls high when they can stay silent and represent an easy way to express opposition. Sadly, this doesn’t remain possible during the presidential election where they actually have to defend a program.
Bardella will most likely be skewered alive by any competent opponent if he is the appointed candidate and manages to pass the first round (two big if).
> this seems highly unlikely to me.
I disagree for many reasons.
1) He led and won the EU elections by a wide margin.
2) Debates are no longer what tips the scale in the elections. Losing a debate is no longer the disqualifier that it once was. See the EU elections where the debates were terrible and not just because of Bardella.
3) This is a new world and Bardella is very good at campaigning on social media and has a very good reach with young people. Other parties besides LFI struggle to talk to people in general.
4) The RN is pretty much leading in all social categories except for retired people who so far had stuck with Macron. That will change as France is bleeding out and needs cash and the current government is going to get it where it can, including from it's most fervent admirers, retired people.
5) Marine Le Pen being sidelined is actually a blessing in disguise. She has worked hard to change the name of the party, change it's image, change it's people, in order to make it more likeable and more modern and by all account she has succeeded.
But there was one thing that always stuck, her name, which represent the past, when her dad ran the party.
Now that she is out, the RN can embrace being "Le Pen" free and some people who did not want to vote for her on principle because of her family history could very well be inclined to support a young, fresh face with 0 political baggage/scandal.
She is the sacrificial lamb, thrown to the wolves and in public they will lament it everywhere but come election time, her name will not be on any pamphlets and the final transformation phase of the party will be completed.
6) TINA (There is no alternative) The French political landscape is frozen in time with the same people doing the same race every 5 years.
The right wing party is basically an appendage to Macron's party at this point, the Socialists are decimated, the other left wing parties will not unite behind JLM due to his controversial views.
The center is going to be split by a civil war in order to decide who will inherit Macron's party as well as his legacy but whoever wins will also inherit the label "more of the same" which sunk Kamala Harris in the US.
Zemmour is now seen as the troublemaker and stands no chance of winning so his supporters will most likely vote for Bardella in the run off.
Bardella is the new kid on the block who will run for the first time and that will generate a lot of buzz, just like when Eric Zemmour ran in 2022.
If we add the votes from all the "far right" parties: RN + Reconquete + NPA, their total is above 40% in the first round according to the latest polls, which is the highest it has ever been.
> The RN always polls high when they can stay silent and represent an easy way to express opposition.
I don't agree with the staying silent part. I think people know by now what the party represents. Less legal and illegal immigration, tougher on crime, better salaries, and so on as it has always been. That is why people vote for them. The rest is small potatoes in comparison.
> Bardella will most likely be skewered alive by any competent opponent
That remains to be seen. Macron won in 2017 just the same. He was not a politician, not a very good debater either and his political stance was murky at best. See the "Yes I am a socialist" bit on TV followed by another bit a while later "No, I am not a socialist"
Novelty can be a good thing and I think the French people are ready for a change. But I guess we will know in two years from now.
Please note that I am expressing my personal views on this issue based on what I have seen and heard from relatives living in France. I personally don't support any of the mainstream candidates so I don't really care who wins or loses.
All of this is highly debatable obviously and I’m not an oracle but find after my replies to your point.
> He led and won the EU elections by a wide margin.
Can’t be compared to the presidential. EU elections turnout is always extremely low and this is seen as a protest election in France with low impact.
Next year municipal will be the true test and the RN does poorly in polls.
> 3) This is a new world and Bardella is very good at campaigning on social media and has a very good reach with young people.
Young people don’t vote. Turnout is always extremely low. It’s a fairly useless demographic when it comes to winning the election.
> 4) The RN is pretty much leading in all social categories except for retired people
But they still lose in virtually all head-to-head and it’s a two rounds election.
> 5) Marine Le Pen being sidelined is actually a blessing in disguise.
The party is still controlled by the Le Pen through and through however. Heck Bardella is only there because he dated (is dating?) one of Le Pen’s grand daughter.
> 6) TINA (There is no alternative)
There are plenty of alternatives.
You have well liked figures of the center like Villepin and Phillipe biding their time waiting to see which one will be candidate.
The PS will probably soon have new leadership which should shake up the landscape on the left.
The right by taking a hard line approach is eroding the RN base.
Plus there will likely be three or four other far right candidates like last time.
It’s a huge mistake to think things will remain stable so far ahead of the election. See Macron was basically unknown three years before winning.
> I don't agree with the staying silent part.
I don’t see how you can disagree. RN controls nearly a third of the parliament. Do you see them acting as a vocal opposition? Clearly they are not. They have next to zero opinion on anything significant and avoided at all costs putting forward a prime minister.
What you are listing is not really being vocal. That’s selling dreams. Anyone can promise better salaries and less criminality without pushing forth anyway to achieve that. That’s the whole point.
I can see that you and I obviously disagree of this topic and I am not an oracle either so we'll see what happens.
> Can’t be compared to the presidential. EU elections turnout is always extremely low and this is seen as a protest election in France with low impact. Next year municipal will be the true test and the RN does poorly in polls.
It still shows momentum. They would have won the parliamentary elections also if the left had not put their differences aside and campaigned under the same banner however the NFP is breaking apart as we speak and so the left parties will all campaign separately.
Municipals don't mean much. The right wing party LR is extremely well implanted locally but had a colossal defeat in 2022 just like the socialists. Even Macron's party has/had trouble getting elected in local elections but that hasn't stopped him from being elected twice. So I don't think this is a good signal as to who will win in 2027.
> Young people don’t vote. Turnout is always extremely low. It’s a fairly useless demographic when it comes to winning the election.
That is true but they definitely increase the spread of the message of the RN. One thing to consider is that most people who use Facebook for example nowadays are the older generation and they vote in big numbers. The RN is also very good at creating viral content.
> But they still lose in virtually all head-to-head and it’s a two rounds election.
It depends on who they are facing but from the latest polls, it seems that they either have a tie or win/lose by less than a percent so within the margin of error really.
> The party is still controlled by the Le Pen through and through however. Heck Bardella is only there because he dated (is dating?) one of Le Pen’s grand daughter.
I don't think it matters to the people who do not like her. They see Le Pen and they don't vote for her but a fresh new face, well that could just do it.
> There are plenty of alternatives. You have well liked figures of the center like Villepin and Phillipe biding their time waiting to see which one will be candidate.
Villepin has already been in power, people like him but he has a legacy and ticks the box "been there, done that".
Same as Phillipe who was prime minister under Macron and is therefore the face of the so called Macronie in all but name. Unless he figuratively "kills" Macron before the election, how is he going to convince people that he would do things differently?
> The PS will probably soon have new leadership which should shake up the landscape on the left.
The PS is stuck between a rock and a hard place, they can't go further left because the more right wing members will go to Macron's party and they cant go further right because they will lose support of the left wing members of their party.
They are frozen in place. No wiggle room here.
> The right by taking a hard line approach is eroding the RN base.
The right is taking a pretended hard line. So far nothing has come out of it. It's Sarkozy 2.0 which means nothing will happen. Since the right wing parties started moving right in 2007 in order to kill the RN, the RN has not only grown stronger, it now dwarfs the old right wing party.
> Plus there will likely be three or four other far right candidates like last time.
Yes, for sure, most likely Zemmour, NDA, Asselinau and Bardella. But it doesn't matter because the people who vote for parties other than the RN will most likely vote for them in the run off.
> It’s a huge mistake to think things will remain stable so far ahead of the election. See Macron was basically unknown three years before winning.
I don't think that things will remain stable but I also don't see a new Macron emerging anytime soon. Macron came at a time where people wanted change and were tired of the right/left switch happening every 5 years. He was a fresh new face and without political baggage. That ship has unfortunately sailed but what he has done is weakened the old parties and basically created a boulevard for the far-right.
It was hard for Macron to form his center coalition when the country was not as divided as it is now. Today, it is basically an impossible task to recreate this sort of environment.
But in any case, we will see. personally my hunch is that Bardella will squeak by in the run off by less than a percent but who knows really? We have crossed the rubicon and there is no turning back.
Maybe some of the EU folks know a greater amount, yet, where did this come from?
Looking on WP, there's nothing... [1] Barely at article. Supposedly the European Anti-Fraud Office opened an investigation in Jan 2014. Never saw a mention in any of the elections. Figure Macron would have jumped on that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_assistants_affa...
In 2017, the European Parliament demanded repayment from Le Pen of almost €340,000. Also, seems like it would been jumped on. [2] "Parliament's financial services deducted tens of thousands of euros from her (Le Pen's) MEP allowance before she left Brussels in 2017. Threatened with an enforceable recovery order, Le Pen eventually repaid €330,000 in July 2023." [2]
[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2024/09/30/w...
Then the Le Monde article gets to actual serious issues: "a preliminary investigation was opened in France in March 2015 for breach of trust." 'A judicial investigation was opened in December 2016 on charges of "breach of trust," "concealment of breach of trust," "organized gang fraud," "forgery and use of forgeries" and "undeclared labor."' "In December 2023, at the end of a nine-year investigation, the investigating judges called for the FN and 27 of its senior members and employees to be tried." [2] Except the Le Monde article is also just a Sept. 2024 article.
Followed the French elections at least a little bit over the last half decade or so, and ... nothing. Read Le Monde at least a bit. Read France24 a bit. Not even a mention of Le Pen being the subject of a nine (9?) year investigation and repaying 300,000 already to the EU Parliament. She was under investigation for "organized gang fraud" during the last election? Seems like it came out of nowhere from the perspective of somebody in the US.
Did this actually make the news regularly in France or the EU? Not much of a supporter or anything, 1000's of miles away, yet all the articles are so recent, and the coverage so nothing, makes me want my tinfoil hat for computer churn articles.
Yes, all of this is fairly well known in France and was commented ad nauseam during the past elections. No conspiracy here.
You can look at the Wikipedia article references which link to a lot of different French newspapers with large readership. A few choices: 2015 - https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2015/03/12/le-f... 2017 - https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=https%3A%2F... 2019 - https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2019/06/14/affaire-...
Why wouldn't they just ban her for life? And why not include the whole party in the ban? She certainly did not act alone.
> When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents. This is their standard playbook throughout the world.
Ah yes, the famous leftist Macron.
Their position is that anyone who doesn’t drink the koolaid is a radical opposite side. It’s exhausting. When they oppress, it is righteous. When the other side holds them accountable, it's oppression. To them, equality and accountability are tyranny.
Haha by US standards he might as well be Karl Marx reincarnated!
why is this post flagged?
My perspective is that there are lot of people with an analogue of some type of fad called such-and-such derangement syndrome (not in DSM), but wholly in support of far-right/fascism -- blinders, for a better term.
We live in weird times. When I grew up, it was a civic duty and social expectation to stamp out fascism and punch Nazis. Now, people downvote and flag when their ills and rightful punishments are reported.
It was strange in the early 2010s when libertarianism (antithetical to fascism, except perhaps anarchocaptialism) seemed to embrace fascism at conferences. For lack of a quick source (it's been over a decade since I saw this happening), here is a medium writeup: https://thomas-perrett97.medium.com/from-hayek-to-hitler-an-...
Now, when you bring out the Nazis, it is called the Godwin point, and it tends to mark the end of constructive discussion and a good time to change the subject.
Marine Le Pen is a far-right politician, the Godwin point is close, and such subjects tend to get flagged on sight before it degenerates. Politics in general tends to get this treatment.
But this time, for such a hot topic, the discussion is, I think, better than expected. With interesting viewpoints independent from her political orientation. I guess that's how this topic was saved.
Every unthinking heuristic that can be exploited, will be. Everything devolves into claims of Nazism and fascism when it the claim is respected. This guy tomrod over here is a Nazi, someone needs to take them out.
she failed so many times, might as well step aside
That's the third EU country to arrest or ban the top opposition candidate or party. Georgescu in Romania, Spartans party in Greece, Le Pen in France. You could even say fourth: head of Gagauzia region in Moldova has been arrested a few days ago. And that's before you consider the attempts to ban AfD in Germany. Is that "democracy"? Would it be "democracy" if, say, Trump jailed Vance's main opponent in 2028?
Romania is definitely political, but the rest of the decisions are due to independent courts. Nobody, including Le Pen, believes this is politically motivated.
This will help her in the long run too.
That is not what MLP is saying. She said that immediate application of the ineligibility sentence in particular is politically motivated.
And even more precisely, that the judges expressed this political motivation explicitly through the use of MLP running in the presidential election as presenting a risk to public peace.
I'm not claiming it is really in the deliberations as I'm yet to read those.
We're seeing just how "independent" courts really are in the US at the moment. There's no reason to believe they're any more "independent" there, especially in Eastern Europe and Greece.
This kind of punishing a politician, though correct legally, would only backfire on the party in power. This was seen in many cases throughout the history of democracies, including Trump's case. No wonder that, politicians happily get into jail as it would get them sympathy credit. And people are not entirely wrong in giving that sympathy.
If you go for the king you need to kill him.
Interesting concept, forcing prominent crooked far-right politicians to face the consequences of their illegal actions.
Would you not expect the same standard to be held for prominent politicians outside the far right?
Yes. I'd expect the law to apply equally.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Sarkozy_corruption_t...
Lagarde 2016, comparable case, same country, very different outcome.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/christine-laga...
Lagarde's case was about 400 million Euro. Le Pen is convicted of embezzling 474.000 Euro.
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Interestingly, the Lagarde case was not ruled by "regular" judges, but by a special court "of politicians, by politicians, for politicians". The idea, being, precisely, to try and deal with separation of power, and avoid the judiciary ruling against "the will of the people".
At the time, the decision was controversial because it was too "nice" with the former minister. I'm pretty sure you can find an archive of the FN/RN spokepersons of the time criticizing the "Cour de Justice de la République."
So, instead, let "normal judges" make decisions about all citizens, voters and elected alike ?
Suddenly that does not sound that appealing.
She will run again. She will keep her deputy job. Her "jail" will be much more confortable than Navalny's. She'll have other decades to run in other élections.
Her party will keep winning some, provided gas prices and taxes and rents still go up. I don't see a politician trying anything against that. She'll be fine.
> the decision was controversial because it was too "nice" with the former minister.
The decision was controversial because the elements presented as proof were weak.
Let’s not rewrite history and remember that Lagarde was guilty of pushing for arbitration where a panel awarded the sum and didn’t herself decide the pay out.
> Interestingly, the Lagarde case was not ruled by "regular" judges, but by a special court "of politicians, by politicians, for politicians"
This is not what the CJR is. It’s a special court which is only competent to judge actions committed by members of the government as part of their function. It mixes elected members of the parliament and senate (six each) and two judges.
It’s important to realise that before the CJR was created, there was only members of parliament in its predecessor the Haute Court and it was never called granting de facto immunity to ministers.
> This is not what the CJR is. It’s a special court which is only competent to judge actions committed by members of the government as part of their function. It mixes elected members of the parliament and senate (six each) and two judges.
Sure. However, it has been criticized for being too "soft" on politicians since the late 90s.[1]
https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2016/12/23/pour...
Christine lagarde was found guilty of negligence, in favor of someone else. Marine Le Pen was found guilty of deliberately embezzling money for her own party. The cases are in no way comparable.
And why would Lagarde neglect several hundred million Euro in favor of someone else?
Lagarde allowed a different between Mr Tapis and the state to go to arbitration where a panel of three judges awarded the several millions - not her. This choice was found to be negligent by the CJR, a court composed mostly of politicians, after the pay out was invalided by the French justice system 8 years later. Lagarde was found guilty of pushing for arbitration as a minister when she shouldn’t have.
To quote the linked article: “The verdict came as a surprise as even the public prosecutor had admitted the evidence against Lagarde was “weak” during a five-day trial last week.”
This has absolutely nothing in common with what’s happening to Marine Lepen. Dozens of emails and messages prove that she presided over a setup designed to embezzle millions for the EU while being fully aware this was illegal.
And to be fair, not even only on the right side.
The left is in the same bath:
https://www.france24.com/en/20170718-france-far-left-leader-...
Since this case is making jurisprudence, the likeliness of them being convicted just become even higher.
This is really just a "they're all doing it too" finger pointing from Le Pen's party.
"The preliminary investigation - already targeting members of France's centrist MoDem party, conservative party The Republicans and the Socialist Party - was opened after a member of Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front asked the Paris prosecutor to look into the issue."
I glad all such allegations will be investigated.
Good. Criminals should be held accountable. I can't believe there's even an argument about this. Whataboutism only breeds more criminal activity.
That hasn't happened yet though, it's only a preliminary investigation.
Absolutely, I would. It just seems that the criminals tend to be from one end of the spectrum....
But crime is crime and justice should always be applied equally.
> criminals tend to be from one end of the spectrum
At best, that trait is highly localized.
And compared to (say) "1900's standard" levels of corruption in Democrat-controlled big American cities - Le Pen's crimes were nickle-and-dime stuff.
It’s been 100 years. Can you find something that happened in this century? With people who are alive today?
How about Greece, where the corruption goes all the way to humanitarian and rehab organization?
https://borgenproject.org/10-facts-about-corruption-in-greec...
(BTW, it ain't been 100 years. Mayor Daly Sr. ran Chicago into the 1970's. Mayor Young ran Detroit into the 1990's. Etc.)
Rod Blagojevich? Bob Menendez? Eric Adams?
Not saying the left is particularly corrupt, there are examples on all sides.
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> It just seems that the criminals tend to be from one end of the spectrum....
Why would you say so? Are there any studies on proportional crime distribution among politicians worldwide?
In the United States, you can compare the number of people in each president's administrations in recent years. There's a striking difference between Republican administrations and Democratic administrations.
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If she's a clear cut fascist criminal and everyone on the other side is great then why wouldn't you want her to run? Should be easy to trounce her if she's as bad as you say.
So if someone is proven to be corrupt we should just let them run in elections and trust that they won’t use corruption or other immoral or illegal means to get elected? Or that they won’t do more of that if they do get elected. Maybe we should never convict any politician of any crime, what could go wrong
I mean why wouldn’t we just take anyone accused of a felony and just hold an election for some high office right there? Then if they win it’s because no crimes were committed, and if they lose obviously it’s because they were criminals. A simple majority should suffice and there’s no need to review any evidence of wrongdoing.
She committed crimes, and having the potential for a felon to achieve power over the government doesn't seem to be conducive for them to be punished under the law.
Allowing a populist criminal to run for office is not great for democracy.
You'd think so, but other elections have proven this to be false.
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Believers just say it was cooked up, and reinforces their belief. Makes the politician a martyr, breaker of chains.
I would rather have them as martyrs. Let them all be martyrs.
Better than not doing anything and allowing them to become actual leaders.
I'm okay with this outcome. Especially if a jury of peers reviews the evidence and stops the far right-wing (fascist) politician from further compounding crimes or marrying their criminality with state power, often abusing the rights of people a democratic government is established to protect.
It is a brave thing to do, to hold popular people accountable for their actions (especially things like leaking secrets to geopolitical adversaries resulting in the deaths of intelligence personnel, or, other things like what Le Pen is guilty of), but it is necessary. Once you let it go, your country becomes ruled by authoritarians.
No, when a martyr becomes popular (elected), the "jury of peers" is likely be composed of the believers as well. They are not going to hold the martyr accountable, but rather their oppressors.
Which is not what happened here. Fascinating.
Is your suggestion to grant legal immunity to any and all far-right politicians so you can avoid their followers' ire just in case they become popular enough for election at some point in the future?
There was no jury in this case. In France jury trials are only in "Cour d'Assises", which deals with the most serious criminal cases.
Factually you can't call her or her party "fascist", either. This is really one of those terms that is over-used to an extent that is not useful at all.
We should all identify far right with fascism. In every case they have taken control, they exercise authoritarianism to the point of removal of dissent -- which is a hallmark of fascism.
I therefore reject your claim this is improper labeling.
The authoritarian right's playbook is simple but brilliantly effective.
The roadmap ends with a strong man dictator that has removed any and all hurdles towards absolute power so that the agenda can be implemented without compromise.
Any roadblock towards this is called "anti-democratic" which is the ultimate irony as those preaching it fully support the end of democracy.
The US is now an inch away from being a dictatorship as the last line of defense, judges, are under severe attack. They're targeted to be impeached, called "radical left" and Musk is throwing money at flipping votes.
This process is happening in several countries and it's baffling how many people eat it up, including in these comments.
I suppose it is true that democracy is fragile and that with a few nudges people vote to dismantle it themselves.
> This process is happening in several countries and it's baffling how many people eat it up, including in these comments.
All of the people who remember the last round of fascism in the 1920s to 1940s are dying off, only those of us who never experienced it are left.
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In Romania there’s some room to argue this, but in France she just plain broke the law and embezzled funds.
Should justice not be served because she’s above the law?
I'm not sure why you'd say there's room to argue about Romania (lying about campaign funding is probably the only easy provable reason to be banned) but it's not the topic here.
"The left". Would be nice to see how you came to this conclusion. Justice applies the law and she was found breaking it.
Also the current government is, by the most lenient definition in France, center-right. Although it shouldn't interfere with the justice system in any direct way, lest we want to enshrine even more the fact that politician in position of power shouldn't ever face consequences.
I think we can agree this would be bad.
Unless you have reason to believe the ruling is unjustified, it is a great day for rule of law, upon which democracy rests.
You mean someone convicted of fraud using the money from that fraude to bolster her popularity was banned by a judge to compete in the elections.
Also in the case of the Romanian candidate he was helped by Russian agencies. Again convicted by a judge.
In both countries judges are not appointed politically. So what makes this that the left bans the right?
So... wait, should she just be allowed do multi-million euro frauds because she's so special? Like, if I did that, I would expect to go to prison. What's so different about her?
I think the GP's sentiment is more around the fact she cannot run for office, not that she isn't sitting in jail.
IMO, let her run, but still put her in jail. If the electorate still chooses her as the best option then it's hard to get away from the continued will of the majority. Don't let her out, but give the people who (and what) they wanted.
No, not in this type of case.
Actually I wouldn't have an issue with that had she been convicted of, say, assault. In that case it would be reasonable for the electorate to decide if her being convicted of assault makes her illegible in their eyes.
But here she has been convicted of fraudulent use of EU money to fund here own party. That money could be used to buy her votes.
France, and most EU countries I think, have strict laws about funding of political parties and campaigns in order to have a level playing field and prevent rich candidates / parties having an undue advantage. If politicians could illegally fund their campaigns beyond what is authorized that could be used to unfairly influence the vote.
> If the electorate still chooses her as the best option then it's hard to get away from the continued will of the majority.
This wouldn't work, there's an obvious loophole:
1. Commit crimes to get elected.
2. If you're caught and sent to prison, offer your supporters campaign money and political favors to vote for you.
3. Once elected, use the powers of your office to pardon yourself, reward your followers, and jail your opponents.
You could do something like: offer your billionaire friends control over government agencies that regulate their industries, and in return they could run sweepstakes where they offer your voters a chance to win $1M if they vote for you.
We could expect an investigation into paying for votes in Wisconsin, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
Republicans stopped the ice cream bribes.
Edit: https://bsky.app/profile/kfile.bsky.social/post/3llodejyyl22...
Ok, I can't even Google what this is about?
https://bsky.app/profile/kfile.bsky.social/post/3llodejyyl22...
Not a fan of screenshots as sources though.
Don't do crimes, if you have done crimes you might be next to be responsible for them.
It's quite a simple concept in democracies under the rule of law, not sure if it's alien where you live.
Also, define the meaning of "left", since even if I try to stretch it to absurd levels I do not see how a French government led by Macron can be considered "left" but I live outside of your brain, pretty hard to understand what the boogeyman means to you.
It's balanced out by the right banning left-wing candidates in Turkey.
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She's now the perfect candidate to run in the U.S.
We’ll see how it plays out, but this could be helping her party ultimately.
1. She is a woman. Her party is very conservative and a male figure would project more strength and attract voters that she might deter to parties further on the right (yes there are a few)
2. She is been here a long time, so she doesn’t exactly qualify as anti-establishment.
3. It makes the party looked harassed, and it is easy for them to state that “everyone is cheating, but they’re the only one paying for it”. Further cementing the image of the party as one of resistance.
4. She’s not good at debates. She gets destroyed every time.
I have been thinking for a long time that she’s the main reason why the far right doesn’t win in France. People would vote a Trumpian president for sure.
Her father was the original party leader and she was vastly more successful as a leader than him.
> She is a woman. Her party is very conservative and a male figure would project more strength and attract voters that she might deter to parties further on the right (yes there are a few)
From what I've been able to discern, among countries that have had an elected female head of state, those women often - if not typically - represent the right wing of the local politics. The idea that conservative parties would disdain a female leader as "weak" strikes me as a strawman created by their political opponents. (However, female conservative candidates for leadership do seem uninterested in treating their gender as a reason to vote for them.)
> She is been here a long time, so she doesn’t exactly qualify as anti-establishment.
This fundamentally misunderstands the meaning of the term.
There needs to be democratic checks and balances against such a judiciary. Impeachment of undemocratic judges needs to be on the table.
You're arguing that the conviction is unsound, or that the sentence I outside that permitted by the French legal code?
I mean clearly the French legal code needs to be changed if this is a valid sentence seems to be the general consensus.
Consensus among Americans on this site, which counts for very little.
I'd bet if you put it to a vote in France you'd find very little appetite to ban her either.
stop applying american ideas to the french system. europe has many checks and balances at several levels, and embezzling Union funds for your campaign does in fact make you not eligible to run for office for some time. it’s not even permanent.
Really making it hard to not believe that France is trying to ban a legal candidate by making this cute shim where everything BUT being able to run is subject to the appeals process.
If you're caught using steroids before the race, you're banned from running in the race (and may be fined, and may face criminal charges). If you want to appeal that's fine, but you can't run in the race today.
She was caught improperly funneling EU funds to her own party (members), which would give her party an unfair advantage in any current political race.
I'm glad to live in a country has strict rules about being able to run for office that has an obscenely high bar before being taken away.
Being convicted of a crime is an obscenely high bar.
Good thing convicting a political opponent of a crime has never been used to crush dissidents.
Sorry, are you claiming that the independent judiciary who convicted her of embezzling funds considers her their "political opponent"? And that the sentence they handed down which is laid out by the French legal system is tantamount to "crushing dissidents"?
I mean, possibly such 'dissidents' should refrain from doing multi-million euro frauds, in that case. Seems like asking for trouble.
There are quite a few things were the sentence can be enforced even during the appeal.
For example, you can be jailed before your trial ; you can have your driving license overturned if you kill someone ; and, it turns out, you can get banned from running into élections if you're found guilty of embezzlement.
Fortunately for her, the next elections are in 2 years ; I would not be surprised is she get an appeal, a reduced ineligibility sentence to allow her to run in the next legislative election. And she might be happy with that - two round presidential elections are hard for her party, and, more importantly : winning an election is a _terrible_ situation in France.
I'm fully aware that in other countries skirting or blatantly ignoring the courts is becoming practice, but I'm definitely not a fan of that practice.