Was Marine Le Pen guilty of improperly funnelling money from the European Parliament into her party’s coffers? Probably. Heaven knows there was a lot of it going on in Brussels.
Should she have been disqualified as a presidential candidate in consequence? Absolutely not. Banning popular opposition candidates is what dictators do. We have come to expect such chicanery from Russia, Belarus, Iran, Venezuela. But France?
We often talk of elections being “rigged”, but falsifying results is technically very difficult. The favoured tool of autocrats is therefore to ban opponents from standing, often by having them convicted of some infraction or other.
Some regimes flaunt their power by levelling deliberately preposterous charges. Imran Khan, by far the most popular politician in Pakistan, was accused of having married his wife too soon after her divorce, in contravention of Islamic law. Ekrem Imamoglu, the only serious challenger to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was charged with terrorism.
Others disqualify candidates for holding the wrong views. In December, Romania cancelled its presidential election two days before it was due because of concerns that Călin Georgescu, a clownish Russophile, would win. Georgescu was then banned from the rescheduled contest, as was another Eurosceptic candidate, Diana Șoșoacă. Their crime? To espouse opinions that were deemed “contrary to democratic values”.
The most common accusation, though, is the one levelled against Le Pen – and, indeed, also against Khan and Imamoglu – namely financial impropriety. Voters can usually be induced to believe that politicians are crooks, and corruption charges can be hard to refute.
Does this mean that Le Pen was innocent? No. My guess is that the verdict against her was correct. A Paris judge ruled that she, along with 24 of her party members including 8 MEPs, knowingly and improperly diverted EU money into national campaigning activities.
But to ban her from national office is not so much excessive as Caligulan. Quite apart from being politically self-defeating – like Khan and Imamoglu, Le Pen has seen her popularity soar as a result of her perceived martyrdom, with 65 per cent of French voters opposing the ban – it is a dangerous further step towards a world where elections are treated as contingent, a means to an end, legitimate only in so far as they deliver approved outcomes.
To grasp the case against Le Pen, you need to understand that MEPs are given eye-popping sums of money to employ staff, and are then given additional budgets to fund political work in their home countries.
The staff allowance last year was set at €30,769 a month – around £26,000, enough to hire a PA, a researcher and a local constituency worker, and still have many thousands left over.
Some MEPs found ways to give that excess to their relatives. (“What is it about you British?” a French colleague once asked me. “You employ your wives and you sleep with your staff!”)
Others were made to kick back a proportion of their allowances to their national parties. Some party leaders apparently went so far as to oblige their Euro-candidates – in secret, obviously, since the whole thing was against the rules – to sign contracts to that effect.
Was Marine Le Pen guilty of improperly funnelling money from the European Parliament into her party’s coffers? Probably. Heaven knows there was a lot of it going on in Brussels.
Should she have been disqualified as a presidential candidate in consequence? Absolutely not. Banning popular opposition candidates is what dictators do. We have come to expect such chicanery from Russia, Belarus, Iran, Venezuela. But France?
We often talk of elections being “rigged”, but falsifying results is technically very difficult. The favoured tool of autocrats is therefore to ban opponents from standing, often by having them convicted of some infraction or other.
Some regimes flaunt their power by levelling deliberately preposterous charges. Imran Khan, by far the most popular politician in Pakistan, was accused of having married his wife too soon after her divorce, in contravention of Islamic law. Ekrem Imamoglu, the only serious challenger to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was charged with terrorism.
Others disqualify candidates for holding the wrong views. In December, Romania cancelled its presidential election two days before it was due because of concerns that Călin Georgescu, a clownish Russophile, would win. Georgescu was then banned from the rescheduled contest, as was another Eurosceptic candidate, Diana Șoșoacă. Their crime? To espouse opinions that were deemed “contrary to democratic values”.
The most common accusation, though, is the one levelled against Le Pen – and, indeed, also against Khan and Imamoglu – namely financial impropriety. Voters can usually be induced to believe that politicians are crooks, and corruption charges can be hard to refute.
Does this mean that Le Pen was innocent? No. My guess is that the verdict against her was correct. A Paris judge ruled that she, along with 24 of her party members including 8 MEPs, knowingly and improperly diverted EU money into national campaigning activities.
But to ban her from national office is not so much excessive as Caligulan. Quite apart from being politically self-defeating – like Khan and Imamoglu, Le Pen has seen her popularity soar as a result of her perceived martyrdom, with 65 per cent of French voters opposing the ban – it is a dangerous further step towards a world where elections are treated as contingent, a means to an end, legitimate only in so far as they deliver approved outcomes.
To grasp the case against Le Pen, you need to understand that MEPs are given eye-popping sums of money to employ staff, and are then given additional budgets to fund political work in their home countries.
The staff allowance last year was set at €30,769 a month – around £26,000, enough to hire a PA, a researcher and a local constituency worker, and still have many thousands left over.
Some MEPs found ways to give that excess to their relatives. (“What is it about you British?” a French colleague once asked me. “You employ your wives and you sleep with your staff!”)
Others were made to kick back a proportion of their allowances to their national parties. Some party leaders apparently went so far as to oblige their Euro-candidates – in secret, obviously, since the whole thing was against the rules – to sign contracts to that effect.