Marine Le Pen has been knocked out of the presidential race and disqualified from standing for public office after she was convicted of misappropriating public funds. She has been given a suspended prison sentence, will have to wear an ankle bracelet for two years, is barred from standing for office for five years, and has been fined €100,000.
Her path to the Élysée has, for now, been blocked by the courts rather than the electorate. Some will see this as a triumph of justice over populism, the rule of law asserting itself against an increasingly threatening far-right. But look more closely at the legal reasoning behind the decision, and the picture is far more ambiguous. What brought Le Pen down was not corruption in the way it is understood in Britain or the United States, but rather a distinctly continental – and profoundly bureaucratic – conception of political authority.
To many British observers, the idea that employing political staff to carry out political work could result in criminal conviction – let alone disqualification from public life – is absurd
The case stems from her time as a Member of the European Parliament, during which she employed assistants who, the court found, were in fact working for her party, the Rassemblement National, rather than for the European Parliament itself.
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