The sentencing of Marine Le Pen to five years of ineligibility for elected office, with immediate effect, is a political earthquake whose aftershocks and effects will be considerable. On the eve of this sentence, a new poll placed Marine Le Pen far ahead of all her competitors in the presidential election. Today, the leader of the Rassemblement National (RN) has been ruled out – perhaps definitively – from the next race to the Elysée.
[Originally published in French on marxiste.org]
On the left many leaders are celebrating the ruling, defending the so-called ‘independence of the judiciary’ and insisting that Marine Le Pen is a ‘defendant like any other’. This is wrong on three counts.
Bourgeois ‘justice’ is not independent. Most of the time, it is the exploited and the oppressed who bear the brunt of the class-based bias of this justice system. But it can also, on occasion, intervene in political conflicts within the camp of the bourgeoisie itself. This is what happened yesterday. Marine Le Pen is not a ‘defendant like any other’: she is a bourgeois politician, extremely wealthy and defended by eminent lawyers, but whose rise has been interrupted by an eminently political judgement.
This judgement will not weaken the RN; on the contrary, it will strengthen it – just as Donald Trump was strengthened by the countless lawsuits brought against him by the American ‘liberal’ bourgeoisie in the vain hope of preventing his re-election. While Marine Le Pen’s immediate future, personally, is seriously compromised, her millions of voters – and, beyond that, millions of exploited people who hate the old ‘traditional’ politicians – will draw the conclusion that her party, the Rassemblement National, is definitely ‘the enemy of the system’. This is, of course, untrue. But they will not change their minds as a result of these grotesque statements about the ‘independence of the judiciary’.
This is all the more obvious given the fact Marine Le Pen is not accused of that type of corruption involving ‘personal enrichment’, of which so many politicians are notoriously guilty without ever having been seriously challenged by the ‘independent judiciary’. Marine Le Pen and her acolytes are accused of having used the funding of their assistants in the European Parliament as they saw fit – for the benefit of the RN. ‘So what?’ many RN voters (and many others) will say to themselves: ‘It's part of the game! And anyway, to hell with the European Parliament and its infernal bureaucracy!’
In essence, this political earthquake is a further expression of the crisis of the regime of French capitalism. When a fraction of the capitalist state apparatus intervenes in such a decisive way in the political life of the country, it is a sign that the traditional mechanisms by which the ruling class ensures its domination are in crisis. In fact, it is the whole edifice of capitalist ‘democracy’ that comes out of it even more discredited. That is why various bourgeois politicians have, since midday yesterday, come out in vociferous protest against the judgement, suggesting ways that it might be overturned. It is not impossible that this will happen.
Instead of bleating stupidly on the theme of the ‘independence of the judiciary’, the leaders of the left and the labour movement must explain the significance and the political implications of the conviction of Marine Le Pen – as we have just done. Above all, they must offer a radical left-wing alternative to the right-wing populism of the Rassemblement National, which is a relentless enemy of the working class. Only a powerful extra-parliamentary mobilisation of young people and workers, based on a programme of breaking with all austerity policies, will make it possible to truly halt the rise of the RN.