2 weeks Ago
Marine Le Pen, the far-right National Rally (RN) candidate for president of France in 2027, was banned from holding public office for five years last week after she was found guilty by a French court of embezzling EU funds. She was also sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, half of it suspended for two years and the other half under house arrest on an electronic ankle bracelet and was fined €100,000. The sentence of imprisonment and the fine were suspended pending appeal, but the ban on holding public office was with immediate effect and hugely controversial in France and among far-right circles world wide.
President Donald Trump likened her case to his own trials and tribulations; other fellow travellers like Victor Orban in Hungary, Georgia Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands all cried foul as if she has done nothing wrong. The evidence, however, tells a different story. Her misuse of EU funds was first exposed by a judgement of the EU general court in June 19, 2018 when she was ordered to repay the EU €300,000.
The court held that the assistant for whom she claimed parliamentary expenses did not work for her or perform work that counted as parliamentary assistance – facts she admitted at trial. She appealed, but her appeal was rejected in 2019 as manifestly inadmissible and manifestly ill founded. The main criticism of the French criminal courts’ decision has been that the ban against Le Pen was undemocratic and in breach of the principle of the separation of powers because it was made with immediate effect rendering her ineligible to be a candidate for president in 2027.
Presiding judge Benedicte de Perthuis, however, told Le Pen that she deserved an immediate ban from holding public office: “The court took into consideration, in addition to the risk of reoffending, the major disturbance of ordre public if a person already convicted is a candidate in the presidential election.” In other words, the ban was made with immediate effect precisely in order to prevent a convicted person from being a candidate for president as that would offend the values on which the French Republic was founded encapsulated in the concept of ordre public . Unlike the US where Trump was a candidate for president despite his criminal past, in France ordre public required the sentencing court to ban Le Pen from running for public office.
In English law ordre public isknown as public policy, but it does not have the same kudos it has in France where it is nothing less than society’s collective morality expounded by judges as a peremptory norm underpinning all law. The constitution of the Republic of Cyprus excludes anyone who has been convicted of a crime involving dishonesty or moral turpitude from being a candidate for president. There is no such blanket ban in France where the judges decide, as custodians of ordre public, if a case before them warrants such a constraint.
French judges are alive to the high incidence of dishonest criminality among top politicians in France. The most recent trial for misusing EU funds to pay party employees was that of the present prime minister, Francoise Bayrou, who was indicted but acquitted in February 2024 – though his party was fined €300,000. The last candidate to be knocked out of a presidential race by an expenses scandal was Francoise Fillon who had been a former prime minister 2007-12 during the presidency of Nicholas Sarkozy – himself a bit of a rogue.
Fillon was the favourite to win the 2017 presidential election for the centre-right Republican Party but was destroyed politically in the first round when it came out that he had arranged a fake job for his wife as his parliamentary assistant for which she was paid more than a million euros. He was subsequently tried and convicted and in the end sentenced by an appeal court in 2024 to four years’ imprisonment suspended for three years with an option to serve one year on an ankle-bracelet, ordered to pay a fine of €375,000 and banned from holding public office for 10 years. A precedent that the Le Pen court must have had in mind when they banned her for five years.
And a kind of poetic justice par excellence as she has in effect been knocked out of the 2027 presidential election by a fake jobs scam, just like Francoise Fillon was knocked out for a similar scam in 2017, when she was the main beneficiary – his disgrace enabled her to go to the final round against Emmanuel Macron that year. Dishonesty and corruption are so widespread among top politicians in France the judiciary are driven to invoke order public and ban those convicted pour encourager les autres . For example, of the four presidents this century two were done for corruption: the late president Jaques Chirac 1995-2007 was convicted of corruption while he was mayor of Paris 1977-1995 and former president Nicholas Sarkozy 2007-12 was recently convicted of attempting to corrupt a judge by offering to advance his career in exchange for information about a case – known as influence peddling.
Healso faces charges that the Libyan government financed his 2007 election campaign in exchange for diplomatic support. Judges have to strike a balance between ordre public and the separation of powers that lies at the heart of political liberty and democracy. The principle is that those who make the laws (the legislators) are not the same as those who govern under the law (the executive) and not the same as those who apply and interpret the laws (the judges).
However it does not mean that wherever there is interactivity between the three branches of government, there is an infringement of the principle but rather that when a clash does happen the other two can intervene if they believe that political liberty has been infringed. In Marine Le Pen’s case this means that her appeal should be heard much more quickly than is normally the case in France where criminal appeals take a very long time to be heard. Her appeal turns on a neat point of law that could easily be heard within six months to enable her to run for president in 2027 if she is successful.
An undue delay in the hearing of her appeal would be a travesty – a classic case of justice delayed justice denied..
