I’ve quoted before AJP Taylor’s line that “There is no example on record of an honest Fascist leader.” Yesterday we looked at One Nation and its prospects in Victoria; today the spotlight has been on Britain and France.
Let’s take Britain first. Its far-right leader, Nigel Farage, is under investigation by a parliamentary committee for failing to declare a multi-million donation. As is the way of these things, that has led the media to dig further and come up with a range of other dubious financial transactions. Farage, of course, denies any wrongdoing and claims political persecution.
Now, to try to reclaim the initiative, he has announced that he will resign his seat in parliament and recontest it at the by-election, ostensibly as a test of public approval. The other major parties – Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – have all refused to co-operate in this stunt and declared they will not run against him; so has the further-right party Restore Britain. If the by-election goes ahead, he looks like being opposed only by the likes of Count Binface and other not entirely serious candidates.
That “if” qualification is required not just because Farage may change his mind but also because resignation from parliament in Britain is not a simple matter. It is achieved by appointment to a notional government office (steward of the Chiltern hundreds or the manor of Northstead) that disqualifies the person from being an MP, and it is theoretically possible for the government to refuse to make the appointment.
This has not been done since 1842 and is not likely to happen now, although the Liberal Democrats have urged that it should. While it would probably be better if the whole obsolete process was scrapped, there is indeed some logic in preventing MPs from abusing it for political advantage (in the same way that some associations have a provision preventing a member from resigning when under threat of expulsion).
Farage won the seat two years ago with 46.2% of the vote, some 18 points ahead of the Conservatives, so he obviously did not feel he was taking any serious risk. But if the parliamentary standards committee ends up ruling against him, a recall petition could lead to another by-election down the track – in which the other parties would be less likely to give him a free pass.
Meanwhile in France, the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen, convicted last year of embezzlement of public money and banned from public office for five years, had appealed against both conviction and sentence. Yesterday the court of appeal upheld the conviction but reduced the sentence, rendering her eligible to participate in next year’s presidential election. It also ordered her to wear an ankle bracelet for twelve months.
Le Pen responded by announcing that she was definitely running for president, and also that she was appealing further to France’s highest court, the Court of Cassation. That allows her to dispense with the ankle bracelet for now, but she runs the risk that conviction and sentence will both be upheld in the months immediately before the election, which is unlikely to be a good look with the swinging voters that she needs to attract.
If the original sentence had been upheld, Le Pen would have endorsed her lieutenant, Jordan Bardella, for the nomination instead. That was a slightly less scary prospect for France’s allies; although both happily take Vladimir Putin’s subsidies, Bardella seems more the simple opportunist and less the ideologue, raising the prospect that in office he might moderate in the way Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has.
While Le Pen probably represents the more serious threat to French democracy, it’s also possible that Bardella would have been the more effective candidate. Although the election is more than nine months off, and hypothetical polling is never very reliable at the best of times, the polls do suggest that he was performing a few points better than Le Pen against the most likely opponents.
But the crucial unknown factor for next year is just who Le Pen’s main opponents will be, and particularly whether a strong candidate from somewhere in the middle ground can get ahead of the far left’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon – who on all indications would lose to Le Pen very badly. We’ll have look at that later in the year when the field has started to resolve itself a bit.
The World is Not Enough 