POPULISTS IN THE DOCK

Late last month, a French court barred Marine Le Pen from standing for political office for five years, on the grounds that her party, the far-right National Rally (RN), systematically embezzled more than 4 million (4.5 million) in public funds.

- Jan-Werner Mueller

Resources earmarked for staff of members of the European Parliament in Brussels were instead used to cover RN’s expenses back in France.

Le Pen is appealing the verdict, and her supporters are not the only ones finding fault with it. Impeccably liberal voices are also arguing that it would be better to allow Le Pen to stand in the 2027 presidential election and be judged by voters. Yet these arguments for prioritising politics over the law are deeply flawed.

One such argument echoes US Vice President JD Vance’s claim that European political elites do not trust their own people. The way he tells it, they have no problem nullifying election results that are not to their liking. His example is the recent Romanian presidential election, which was declared invalid after the far-right candidate, Clin Georgescu, won the first round. Concluding that he had failed to “comply with the electoral regulations,” the Romanian electoral bureau prohibited him from standing altogether.

Short of bans, European elites have excluded far-right parties from governing. The most important recent example of this is Germany’s “firewall”-a commitment by all the other major parties not to govern with the far-right Alternative fiir Deutschland (AfD), which finished second in the February federal elections.

Yet there is absolutely no evidence that the French judiciary was acting at the behest of politicians or, more important, that it was picking on Le