The left AGAIN tries to use the courts to thwart democracy

This time, the "elections are too important to let voters decide" moment happened in France. It'll probably go about as well as the Democratic attacks on Donald Trump did last year.

Marine Le Pen is easily the most popular politician in France.

On Sunday, a poll found her the clear front-runner for the 2027 Presidential election. On Monday, a French court said she couldn’t run.

A judge in Paris found Le Pen and her right-wing National Rally party had used funds from the European Union to pay party workers. For this sin, the judge sentenced Le Pen to two years of house arrest — and banned her from the 2027 election.

The decision is France’s version of the Democratic efforts to chase Donald Trump from the 2024 Presidential race. It comes as German politicians are considering moving against the AfD, that county’s major right-wing party. When will the left realize these games undercut its claim to stand for democracy and the rule of law?

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(Calling all freethinkers!)

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Legacy media outlets, in Europe and the United States, call the National Rally party “far right.” Almost definitionally, that can’t be true; the most popular party in a democracy can be conservative, liberal, even communist, but it can’t be far anything.

The National Rally was founded in 1972 as the National Front by Le Pen’s father, Jean, who defended French collaboration with the Nazis and downplayed the Holocaust. Marine Le Pen ousted her father from it in 2015 and changed its name in 2018.

She repudiated Jean’s most noxious views and moved the party left economically, promising to protect France’s generous welfare state. At the same time, she kept its core anti-immigration and tough on crime attitudes. In other words, she remade it as populist and nationalist first, conservative second, very much like Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

Her changes have resonated with French voters, who are frustrated with violence and terrorism from poorly integrated Muslim immigrants. Many of the deadliest terror attacks against Western countries have occurred in France, including the Bataclan nightclub massacre and related attacks in November 2015, which killed 131 people.

France also appears to be swinging against expensive decarbonization efforts, though its backlash has not been as severe as Germany’s, probably because the French have nuclear power plants keeping electricity relatively affordable.

And so Marine Le Pen is now the front-runner for the 2027 French Presidential election. The poll Sunday found her with the support of 37 percent of voters, about 15 points ahead of anyone else.¹

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(Far-right! If CNN says it, you know it must be true.)

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But barring an appeal experts on French law say will probably not be heard in time for her to get on the 2027 ballot, Le Pen won’t be allowed to stand for the Presidency.

Is this liberté?

The crimes for which Judge Bénédicte de Perthuis found Le Pen guilty are not quite traffic tickets, but they are minor. They amount to putting a few party workers on the European Union’s payroll. Even the BBC, hardly a right-wing news organization, acknowledged that “practically every French political party has resorted to similar underhand methods in the past.”

The trial, which started last year, had attracted little attention. Almost no one expected that the court would presume to keep Le Pen from running even if it did find her guilty.

But de Perthuis had other ideas.

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It is impossible not to hear in the Le Pen case echoes of the way the Democratic prosecutors and liberal judges prosecuted — and, yes, persecuted — Donald Trump last year.

Europe, like the United States, is riding a nationalist-populist-conservative wave. The rise of the National Rally in France comes alongside that of Alternative for Germany and the Brothers of Italy, which has ruled Italy since 2022, an eternity in Italian politics.

As in the United States, the rise of the right has raised fears among Europe’s elites and legacy media outlets, often tied to Germany’s Nazi past and the continent’s long and bloody history of nationalist aggression.

The elites seem to have forgotten that these are democracies. And voters in them are tired of the way they’ve been governed. Le Pen has been gaining ground for over a decade; with each Presidential election she has taken more votes.

The United States has a problem with income inequality, but Europe has an even bigger problem with economic stagnation. Voters on both continents have clearly decided that welcoming millions of poorly educated illegal immigrants a year is not the answer to either.

European and American elites may not like that view. They may even find it dangerous.

But for a generation, they have controlled every societal lever, including academia, the film and television industries, the news media, and powerful non-governmental organizations. They have worked in coordinated fashion to impress upon the proles the necessity for decarbonization — which they style as opposition to climate change² — mass immigration, drug decriminalization, and their other obsessions.

They have been rejected.

What they ought to do is try to figure out why.

What they are doing is crying fascism at every opportunity — and looking for ways to force aside the candidates voters prefer.

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(You have a choice. Choose Unreported Truths.)

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Last spring, Democrats tried to use the courts, particularly in New York, to destroy Donald Trump. At the time, I called this strategy out as dangerous and self-defeating, as it so clearly was.

In November, American voters delivered their verdict, punishing Democrats for their arrogance. The lawfare provoked a deserved backlash. Trying to tell people that they can vote for anyone, except the candidate they really like, is a prescription for failure in democracies.

I strongly suspect that the French will soon teach their elites the same lesson.

At least this time it won’t come with a guillotine.

1. In the French system, any number of candidates can run, as long as they receive 500 endorsements from elected officials like mayors. If no one receives a majority in the first round of voting, the top two candidates advance to the second round.

2. This does not include grounding the private jets upon which elites rely.