Marine Le Pen: A Poisoned Bracelet

MADAME LA PRÉSIDENTE? Not yet. Marine Le Pen has been trying to be president of France for a long time. Three successive defeats—2012, 2017 and 2022, the last fictionalised in Michel Houellebecq’s fevered imagination as an Islamist-leftist apocalypse in Submission as early as 2015—didn’t deter her. Till she was convicted of misuse of public funds last year—mostly EU salaries for aides to EMPs diverted to party coffers—and a young Jordan Bardella looked almostcertain of being the National Rally’s candidate in 2027. Well, Le Pen can’t scream “judicial tyranny” anymore after an appeals court upheld her conviction for embezzlement but allowed her to run for president. The court said it won’t “infringe upon the prin­ciple of freedom to stand for election.”

But the spectacle of the presidential frontrunner wear­ing an electronic ankle tag (which the French call a bracelet) on the stump shouldn’t be her chief worry. Populists, from Donald Trump to Nigel Farage, have defined themselves by battles with the judicial system and while Le Pen might think she has a real shot at entering the Élysée Palace next year, the court has put her political fate in her hands and those of mainstream French voters who, unlike her loyal base, are not impressed. They won’t forget. And they may not forgive, just as they didn’t forgive François Fillon, a sure-shot winner in 2017 till he was consumed by a financial scandal. Le Pen overhauled the French far-right, abandoning its anti­semitism and even the cause of ‘Frexit’. She is popular when populists are still on an upswing in Europe. But the French lost their appetite for uncharted territory long ago.