If you took its rhetoric at all seriously, you would probably be surprised at the fact that the far right, which campaigns vigorously on “law and order” issues, regularly shows itself quite unconcerned about criminality in its own ranks. The adulation of convicted felon Donald Trump is only the most obvious instance.
When you realise that being “tough on crime” is really about persecution of young people and racial minorities, the mystery goes away. Actual crime isn’t the issue; it’s just code for a culture war.
And so in France, the conviction this week of Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally, on charges of embezzling public money to fund party activity, has left most of her partisans unperturbed. They are happy to accept her claims of political persecution rather than seeing it as – in the words of Megan Clement, whose account in Crikey is particularly good – “essentially a straightforward conviction for systematic corruption.”
Le Pen’s scheme was unusually brazen and comprehensive, but it would be wrong to think that this sort of thing is out of the ordinary in France. Far left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon received a suspended sentence in 2019 for having shoved a police officer during investigation of a similar operation by his party. Centre-right presidential candidate François Fillon was embroiled in a similar scandal in 2017, for which he was eventually convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison (he remains free on appeal). And officials from centrist party MoDem were convicted of the same thing just last year, although their leader and now prime minister François Bayrou was acquitted.
So it’s perhaps no surprise that both Mélenchon and Bayrou, despite their political differences with Le Pen, expressed concern about her conviction. President Emmanuel Macron, on the other hand, was less forgiving, commenting that “the law is the same for everyone.”
I wrote about this back in 2018, when the investigation of National Rally was already under way, and compared it to the scheme perpetrated by the Labor government of Daniel Andrews in Victoria – known as the “red shirt” scandal. No-one was ever charged in that; while on a smaller scale, it was the same basic idea as Le Pen’s scheme, diverting public employees to party purposes.
On one level that’s ironic, since Andrews was a particular hate figure for exactly the sort of people who uncritically support Trump and Le Pen. But that merely confirms that the practice is widespread: I was a minor participant in a similar scheme perpetrated by the Liberal Party back in the 1990s, as I later revealed in the Age. The legality of such schemes in Australia is uncertain, but that’s cold comfort for the taxpayers. To again quote Michael Kinsley, “the scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal.”
For the National Rally it might seem to be a win-win situation. Its leadership can claim victim status, just as Trump did, and as an anti-establishment party it also benefits from the perception that the whole political class is corrupt. But it’s not clear that the swinging voters it needs to attract will see it that way. Unless this week’s judgement is overturned, Le Pen will be ineligible for the 2027 presidential election, and with Macron also unable to run again the field is wide open.
Bayrou, however, faces a more urgent problem than that. National Rally had supported his government in a vote of confidence to pass his budget a few weeks ago, and although strictly speaking he had a majority without its votes, open hostility from the far right would make his government’s life very difficult. The position of the Socialist Party, itself deeply divided on how to deal with Bayrou, will become even more critical.
For the rest of us, it’s a reminder that the far right’s promise to “drain the swamp” is deeply dishonest, and that clean government and impartial justice are vital weapons in the defence of democracy.
The World is Not Enough 