Donald Trump’s Claim That Marine Le Pen’s Conviction is a ‘Witch Hunt’ Doesn’t Hold Up

On Monday Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far right party Le Rassemblement National was found guilty of embezzling 4.4 million euros of public funds from the EU in relation to the so-called “fictitious assistants scandal”.

The verdict delivered a penalty of four years in prison, two of which are suspended, two of which are to be served at home with an electronic tag, a 100,000 euro fine and, most importantly, five years of ineligibility to run for public office with “proximate execution” meaning that the penalty applies even during the appeal process.

This means that it will be highly unlikely she can run for office again at the presidential election in 2027.

Following the verdict, US President Donald Trump denounced it as a “Witch Hunt” posting on his Truth Social platform that it was “another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going so far as to put that Opponent in prison.”

Dismissing the case against Le Pen as a “bookkeeping” error, Trump demanded that France “FREE MARINE LE PEN!”

The reality of the case is quite different, however.

According to the judgement, Le Pen sat at “the heart” of a “carefully organised system” of embezzlement of EU parliamentary funds by running a fake jobs racket in which permanent members of party staff were declared EU parliamentary assistants and had their salaries paid by the EU.

Several other high-ranking members of the RN were also found guilty of embezzlement as part of this system, such as MP Julien Odoul, Perpignan mayor and RN vice-president Louis Aliot and the MEP Nicholas Bay who now sits with Identite et Liberte, a micro-party founded by Marion Marechal Le Pen, Marine’s niece.

MEPs for the Front National (now rebranded as the Rassemblement National) would have one assistant dedicated to their parliamentary work and the rest of their budget for staff would be spent on permanent members of the party.

Two of the assistants for MEP Ferdinand Le Rachinel for example never actually worked for him and were in fact Jean Marie Le Pen’s private secretary and bodyguard.

The judgement describes how when Marine Le Pen inherited the system from her father Jean Marie, she actively chose to maintain it.

She instructed MEPs at a meeting in July of 2014 that they should give Charles Van Houtte power of attorney to decide their budget allocation and choose their cabinets and told the assembled that they would only need one assistant for their parliamentary work and the remaining balance of their budget would be at the party’s disposal.

Le Pen has continued to protest her innocence by using the argument that it is normal that parliamentary assistants should do political work. She told the court “I have absolutely no sense of having committed the slightest irregularity, or the slightest illegal act”, reiterated her innocence after the verdict and immediately said that she would launch an appeal.

This set of facts, and the news of the judgment, set political discourse alight as one of the most infamous figures of global politics was banned from running in a presidential race that polling suggests she had a good chance of winning.

The global far right immediately rallied to Marine Le Pen’s side. Hungarian leader Victor Orban declared ‘Je suis Marine’, US Vice President JD Vance announced his support for her, as did X owner Elon Musk and the former President of Brazil, Jair Bolsanaro. They all suggested that she had been singled out unfairly, compared to other parties in French politics who have been accused of similar crimes.

However, the crimes they are accused of were of a considerably smaller magnitude to Le Pen and the trials are either ongoing, so the argument is irrelevant until the judgement comes, or settled, in which case they are arguing against the impartiality of the whole judicial system in France.

Additionally, Chirac and Sarkozy also received ineligibility penalties of one and three years respectively when convicted – the lesser penalties could be explained by the fact that they weren’t seeking office again after being president, but perhaps it does point to a minor inconsistency, though Le Pen, having denied everything, did not give herself the option of consideration for contrition.

Others, including her enemies, have claimed that it is undemocratic to prevent a candidate from standing. Leftist former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, no doubt informed by his own experience of democracy a la the European Union when the result of the Greek oxi vote was overthrown by the diktat of the troika, compared her to Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Ímamoğlu imprisoned by Erdogan. This strains credulity. The evidence against Le Pen is overwhelming, the evidence against Ímamoğlu scant. Nor is there anything approaching the same level of corruption of the judiciary in France as Turkey.

This is not to say there are no causes for concern regarding the politicisation of the law in France. There is an emerging pattern in French politics of allies of Macron getting off lightly and enemies of his going down. Bernard Arnault, believed to have financed Macron’s first presidential campaign, was able to escape with a slap on the wrist (a 10 million euro settlement for the world’s richest man, without Arnault even having to testify) after he employed a former intelligence chief, who in turn employed serving police, to spy on a journalist.

Similarly, protesters in the various waves of unrest that have rocked the Macron presidency have been subjected to fast-track trials that mete out long sentences for very minor infractions or simply being present while others committed acts of vandalism, with limited transparency or option to appeal.

Amnesty found in 2020 that thousands of people had been wrongly punished under this system designed to clamp down on Macron’s enemies in the street, and this is before bystanders were unfairly swept up in the dragnet following the riots sparked by the killing of Nahel Merzouk.

However, the areas in which justice has been politicised against the opponents of the Government have very little bearing upon the far right who have often been the cheerleaders for this warping of the system against dissenters.

Indeed, Gerald Darmanin, the hard right justice minister who once described Marine Le Pen as “too soft” in a debate on immigration, intervened telling the courts that he hoped her appeal “could be processed as soon as possible”.

Le Pen and her allies have proceeded to attack the judges and the judicial system for imposing a penalty that she once argued should be made mandatory for politicians found guilty of her exact crime.

Given Le Pen was convicted under laws that one might disagree with, but which nonetheless apply to every citizen, it could also be argued that to exempt her from them on political grounds would itself be a subversion of democracy.

This is all to say that Varoufakis is wrong. It might, from afar look like lawfare, and there are good reasons to interrogate how impartial the French judicial system actually is, but the lawfare claims do not stand up to scrutiny.

The left-wing party La France Insoumise, which Varoufakis supports, argued against the use of proximate execution which they have long rejected in principle, but they did not claim lawfare either.

There are arguments about the political fallout, Anne Elisabeth Moutet claims in the Telegraph that this is lawfare (see above) and that this doomed to backfire, martyring Le Pen and turbocharging an antisystem vote.

Peter Allen in the Independent meanwhile claims that the RN is now doomed to lose a presidential election. I don’t think either of these things is likely.

The RN’s vote is at this point consolidated largely around immigration and cost of living issues, which voters often link in their minds.

True, part of the RN’s appeal is their antisystem positioning, but they have consciously been trying to shake this image after establishing their hold on the right, instead working to present themselves as a credible party of government, only relying on emotionally charged anti-elite rhetoric when necessary.

Perhaps there is a small wellspring of abstentionists they could tap in returning to a populist discourse, but martyrdom carrying the party to power seems unlikely.

Peter Allen’s claim is also misguided. Le Pen is not a tribune politician, whose personality acts as a lightning rod for anger of the downtrodden. She is actually not very good at this and has instead built the party up over the years with a message of anti-immigration, racism, law and order and social protection for native French people.

Maybe the contradiction of being a law-and-order party of convicted criminals could harm them, but my recent conversations with RN voters have tended to focus in on prices and immigrants, and I doubt that this conviction will change voters’ perceptions either of higher prices or their immigrant neighbours.

Perhaps her successor will prove totally incompetent and that undoes the party, or maybe the civil war between Bardella and Marion Marechal will reopen, and another right-wing split will damage the party’s chances, but this does not amount to the party being “doomed”.

Trump’s verdict on the case is clearly wrong. However, what Le Pen’s opponents must realise is that the project of the French far right, and the reactionary international more generally can only be beaten politically, at the ballot box, as the New Popular Front did last summer in the legislative elections. This verdict should be thought of by liberals and lefties like an advancement on the battlefield, not as the winning or losing of a war.