Wolfgang Hansson
This is a commentary text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.
Published 18.47
Can a person who has committed serious crimes still become the country's president?
In the USA with Donald Trump at the helm, the answer to that question is obviously yes.
In France, it seems to be no.
But is it the courts that will decide that or the voters?
Quick version
I interpret the ruling against Marine Le Pen as the French judges wanting to avoid a situation like the one in the United States before the presidential election there last year.
Donald Trump was convicted of fraud but managed to delay a number of other trials where the charges were much more serious.
Voters knew the broad outlines of the charges, but since no trials were held, the details remained partly unknown.
The result is that the United States today has a president who was suspected of instigating a coup d'état, who took top-secret documents with him when he left office, and who openly tried to get the election commissioner of the state of Georgia to falsify the state's presidential election results.
Of course, it is highly unsatisfactory that these matters were not legally tested before Trump was elected.
The reason was a combination of slow action by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and Trump's lawyers, who exploited every loophole in their attempts to delay the process so that the trials would not be completed before the presidential election.
If the same rules had applied in the US as in France, Trump could have been stopped from running.
When Le Pen was sentenced yesterday, the evidence was so convincing that she had used EU money to finance the activities of the far-right National Rally in France that everyone expected a conviction.
What came as a shock was that the three judges who decided the case also banned her from running in general elections for five years.
The norm in Western justice is that no judgment becomes final until an appeal has been heard in all instances.
The judges in Le Pen's case departed from that principle when it came to the political ban.
Their reasoning is that there was a risk that the appeals and the continued legal process would drag on so long that Marine Le Pen would have time to run in the next presidential election in the spring of 2027.
Perhaps the judges were influenced by what had happened in the US. They feared that Marine Le Pen and her lawyers would resort to all legal means to delay the process until she had hopefully, in their eyes, been elected president.
By then it would be too late to stop her.
Now the opposite is true. Her only chance is to appeal as quickly as possible and then try to speed up the process. If she were acquitted at the highest level, the ban on running in the presidential election would likely be lifted.
The problem is that the evidence against her is so strong that an acquittal appears unlikely. In addition, the process is expected to take a long time, perhaps several years.
Even if she were to be acquitted, the time until the election is so short that the National Rally will need to nominate another candidate if it wants to fully participate in the election campaign.
Just as Donald Trump in the US portrayed the legal proceedings against him as a witch hunt orchestrated by his political opponents, Marine Le Pen claims that the verdict against her is political.
The establishment wants to prevent her from running because they know she has a good chance of winning the presidential election, she and her supporters claim. Opinion polls indicate that she has a good chance of winning.
The verdict puts France in a difficult situation.
If Le Pen had been allowed to run in the presidential election, the risk would have been a president guilty of gross fraud and with a four-year prison sentence to serve. Even if she had only had to serve two years in anklets.
Now, instead, there is a risk of increased polarization in French society, where a third or more of the population believes that their presidential candidate was stopped for political reasons. With the risk that this entails for violent protests and political turbulence.
Le Pen's party is the largest in the National Assembly and can both bring down the current government and block a new one. She does not intend to give up and is threatening to use all legal means to lift the ban.
Donald Trump was not slow to draw parallels with himself.
- This is a big deal. I know all about it. She was the leading candidate and has been blocked from running for five years. It sounds very much like in this country.
Right-wing nationalist leaders all over the world are joining the chorus of complaints.
So the question is who benefits from the verdict.
Does the verdict give Le Pen a martyrdom that she can exploit in the 2032 elections or will it greatly weaken the far-right party?
What the world learned from the United States was that voters knew that Donald Trump was convicted and suspected of a number of serious crimes.
Yet they elected him president.
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