Banning Marine Le Pen shows the establishment’s fear of populism—which is winning all over the world.
When former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke won the Republican nomination for Governor in Louisiana in 1991, all the conventional Republicans condemned him, including then President George H. W. Bush, and his opponents brought everything they could to bear on him including voodoo dolls. What they did not do was pass a law banning him from running.
Was this because America is a democracy with the rule of law—or because they just hadn’t thought of it? Certainly they’ve thought of it in Europe.
There has long been a not unreasonable post-war ban in Germany on any party based on the former Nazi Party, and at one point during the Cold War, the Communist Party was banned in some European countries (like Greece) which were, at the time, considered undemocratic by American liberals for doing it. Now some post-Communist countries ban Communist parties.
The thing is, when governments were banning the Communist Party—something that never happened in the US—they were doing it because the Communists were run from a foreign country—the former Soviet Union.
Now the Europeans are banning parties because they’re NOT run from a foreign country, and don’t want their countries run by the EU, United Nations, or other globalist organizations.
Marine Le Pen Takes up the Torch of Enlightenment at Nationalist Conference
The French Government has been trying for years to suppress Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, and their latest attack is a bogus conviction for “embezzlement” alleging that when she was in the EU Parliament, she either gave parliamentary assistant jobs to party figures, or to put it another way, used parliamentary assistants for partisan work—which almost all EU Parliament members could be found guilty of.
France’s far-right leader Le Pen sentenced to prison and banned from office in embezzlement trial
Le Pen may still appeal the four-year sentence, two years of it suspended, and five-year political ban, which came after she was found guilty of misusing $3 million to pay party staff.
By Astha Rajvanshi, NBC, March 31, 2025
Far-right French leader Marine Le Pen was handed a four-year prison sentence and banned from holding public office for five years by a French court Monday, in what could be the biggest setback for her political cause in a generation.
Until this week, Le Pen had looked like the likeliest winner in France’s next presidential election set for 2027, but she was found guilty Monday by a court of embezzling European Union funds.
When handing down the sentence, the court said the crimes committed by Le Pen, 56, warranted an immediate ban from public office, Reuters reported. The court also handed her a fine of 100,000 euros ($108,195).
Le Pen’s lawyer said she would appeal the verdict, but she will remain ineligible while she does and could therefore be ruled out of the 2027 presidential race. She was also sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, with two to be served under house arrest and two suspended.
Speaking to French TV channel TF1, Le Pen said that a ruling barring her from seeking public office is “political” and aims to keep her out of the race for France’s top job. She added that millions of people were “outraged” about the verdict and the ruling was a violation of the rule of law. [More]
She’s right about millions of people being “outraged”—I think it’s outrageous, and I don’t even live in France. Le Pen will appeal, but if her appeal doesn’t succeed, she may actually go to jail for this non-crime—and remember, in effect, her real crime is being a French patriot.
The Great Repatriation and France
She’s not alone—the Romanian election was cancelled or perhaps I should say annulled by the Romanian Supreme Court, owing to claims of foreign interference, based on an “intelligence report”
that pointed to Russian election interference on behalf of Călin Georgescu, an obscure far-right nationalist who unexpectedly became the favorite to win after the first round of voting. The court’s abrupt about-face threw Romania’s political landscape into chaos, stunning both domestic observers and the international community.
Why Romania Just Canceled Its Presidential Election
The Romanian government is trying to guard against Russian election interference. But such a drastic, unexpected, and last-minute move risks undermining people’s faith in democracy.
By Veronica Anghel, Journal of Democracy, December 2024
All the evidence for foreign election interference consists of is a bunch of social media promotion like, according to the BBC, “almost 800 Tiktok accounts created by a “foreign state” —and without even the 2016 bogus charge against Trump that he had somehow “colluded” with Russian Facebook ads.
The German Election is a Window to Pan-Western Political Transformation
In Germany the populist—and popular—Alliance For Germany (AfD) is more or less “frozen out” of power, despite a level electoral success that would normally guarantee a less-hated party a place in a coalition government.
That’s why historian Darryl Cooper said on Twitter
On the heels of events in Romania and Germany’s moves against the AfD, I don’t want to see anyone else acting confused about what I meant when I said it’s become illegal to be right wing in the post-WW2 West.
This keeps happening: Belgium banned an entire political party (the Vlaams Blok)in 2004, and the British spent years finding reasons to arrest Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, and to cripple the Party’s operations.
There have been attempt to do the same thing in the US—there was more than one attempt to put Trump in jail, with prosecution even more bogus than the one against Marine Le Pen. There was also an attempt to “disqualify” Trump from the Colorado Presidential ballot on the theory that Trump had committed an “insurrection” by making a speech before the January 6 Capitol Protest.
It didn’t work. Trump won not only his court cases, but both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
Even if Le Pen doesn’t win her appeal in time for the French election, her party will forge ahead without her. The forces of nationalism and patriotism can’t be suppressed now.