From the conviction of Marine Le Pen on Monday March 31^st to the rally of support held by her far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party in Paris on Sunday April 6^th, the past week has seen an unprecedented surge in France’s drift towards Trump-style politics. We have witnessed attacks on the judiciary, threats aimed at judges and early challenges to the legitimacy of the next presidential election in 2027. The rule of law has been intimidated with a force that should not be underestimated.

For several days, the RN and its fellow travellers have raged across the airwaves, calling for “political justice” and denouncing a “democratic scandal” and a “dictatorship of the judges”. It has been a noisy campaign designed to muffle what really lies at the heart of the court case: the establishment of a system by a party seeking the highest office that siphoned off more than 4 million euros of public money to pay for fake jobs. These charges, with Marine Le Pen at the centre of them, were long denied throughout years of investigation and weeks of court hearings.

As soon as the ruling was made public, and despite the care taken by the president of the court, Bénédicte de Perthuis, to spell out over nearly three hours the thinking behind the judges’ decision, debate quickly shifted to the immediate enforcement of that part of the sentence which bans her from running for public office. Across the media and even on the benches of the National Assembly, outrage focused not on the fact that Marine Le Pen sought the presidency despite being convicted of such a serious breach of public trust, but rather on the notion that she could now be blocked from running for the Élysée. “It’s French democracy that is being executed,” declared the RN’s president, Jordan Bardella, with a straight face.

Marine Le Pen at the National Assembly April 1^st 2025. © Photos Michel Euler / AP via Sipa

“Is France still a democracy?” asked, just as seriously, Éric Ciotti, head of the rightwing Union des droites pour la République (UDR), a former leader of the conservative Les Républicains (LR) who has been aligned with Marine Le Pen since June 2024, speaking on social media and national television. The airwaves and social media – led by media controlled by French businessman Vincent Bolloré - swiftly reacted and fanned the flames, amid veiled hints at coups d’état, and again gave voice to the global reactionary right. “We’re witnessing exactly what vice-president JD Vance warned about in his speech – the weakening of democracies,” was one comment on Bolloré’s television news channel CNews.

On February 14^th in Munich, Germany, the vice-president of the United States had indeed launched a scathing attack on the European model of democracy, casting his country as an enemy of the rule of law that has held sway in Europe since 1945. Then, reacting to Marine Le Pen’s conviction last week, he said: “[She’s] leading in some polls. [And] for an incredibly minor charge […]They’re trying to throw her in prison and throw her off the ballot. Look, that’s not democracy.” Donald Trump quickly followed, talking of a “witch hunt” and calling for the RN leader to be “freed”.

The list of Marine Le Pen’s backers abroad alone gives a sense of the abyss towards which the far-right party is seeking to drag us. These include Donald Trump’s United States, of course, but also Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, both of whom reacted so quickly to the ruling on March 31^st that the judgement was still being read out in court, and Giorgia Meloni’s Italy. All those political figures who believe the judiciary is an illegitimate check on power and who rail against public freedoms came together to attack the French court’s ruling. And, in doing so, they attacked the foundations of our democracy.

In their view, a view shared by the RN, political leaders should not be held to account for how they uphold the law, except by their own electorate. Anyone who questions the legal basis of their actions becomes an enemy to be crushed. Viktor Orbán made this very clear on his country’s national Revolution Day on March 15^th, during a speech in which he likened his enemies - “journalists”, “judges”, “fake civil organisations” and “political activists” - to “bedbugs that have survived the winter”, before vowing a “big Easter clean-up”.

Three weeks later, on Thursday April 3^rd, the Hungarian prime minister announced his desire to pull his country out of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as he hosted a visit by his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister is himself a figure of the Israeli far-right, who is surrounded by corruption scandals and challenges from international law, and who has just given his blessing to the RN’s Jordan Bardella. In Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, as in Marine Le Pen’s France, the notion of an independent judiciary does not sit well with a political programme built on falsehoods and the monopolisation of power.

No accountability for politicians, a tough approach for the rest

It is this kind of thinking that led the RN to call for a large demonstration in France on Sunday, as a way of conjuring up the spirit of the January 2021 attack on the Capitol Building in Washington (even though in the end the rally failed to attract large numbers). In this, the far-right party can draw on the domestic example of François Fillon; this failed rightwing presidential candidate, besieged by legal woes of his own, who rallied his supporters at a campaign rally at the Trocadéro centre in Paris in 2017, to pile pressure on the courts. Or the example of justice minister Gérald Darmanin, then interior minister, who joined a police march in 2021 to, once again, apply pressure on the judiciary. Or that of Darmanin’s successor as interior boss Bruno Retailleau, who recently turned up at a similar protest and speaks of “red judges”, heaping yet more pressure on the justice system.

The RN now feels emboldened in its attack on the country’s institutions not only because of its own momentum, but because the path has been laid for it over years by political forces that were meant to block its advance. The French executive’s own repeated attacks on the checks and balances to power, its open flirtations with leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and its ongoing challenges to the rule of law, have all helped clear the way.

Supporting tough legal crackdowns so long as they do not affect them, prime minister François Bayrou’s government - joined by some of the opposition, including on the Left - could find nothing better to do last week than to wade into a row over how Marine Le Pen’s ban on seeking political office should be applied. While some politicians voiced concern over ad hominem threats against judges, many political figures seized the opportunity to themselves stir up mistrust towards the justice system.

Not only did the prime minister make clear his “unease” following Marine Le Pen’s conviction, he even went so far as to ask Parliament to look into changing the law on the immediate application of bans on running for office. Yet so much could instead have been said about the RN’s open flirtation with notions of a coup. And lots could have been said, too, about the essence of the Le Pen court case itself, in a country that is slipping down global ranks for tackling corruption, and in a nation where the number of corruption cases rose by 28% between 2016 and 2021, according to official figures.

“National and international measures that have been implemented are of only limited use, both when it comes to fighting corruption and in winning back trust among the people,” said Françoise Dreyfus, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Paris I University and author of Sociologie de la corruption (published by La Découverte in 2022), in the weekly television and cultural magazine Télérama. Yet such problems, which are largely due to the low level of resources devoted to probing white-collar crime, are never openly debated in public, even after a ruling of this scale.

“Let’s open our eyes. The French political classes have learnt nothing. They still seek one privilege only, that of being beyond blame, no matter the political or moral cost, while staying quiet on overcrowded prisons and the fact that [criminal] sentences are enforced on a daily basis on ordinary citizens,” declared lawyers William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth in Le Nouvel Obs news magazine. They summarised it this way: “A tough approach towards the weak. This is pushed and praised in nauseating, rabble-rousing speeches. When the time comes to answer for their own actions, they cry foul, play the victim and lie.”

“Let’s indeed open our eyes” now after the events of recent days. And look at the world into which the far-right and their friends want to push us.

Antton Rouget and Ellen Salvi