This Is No Way to Stop the World’s Trumps

Opinion|This Is No Way to Stop the World’s Trumps

France is still in shock.

The ruling last week that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally misused millions of euros in European Parliament funds has upended the country’s politics. As Ms. Le Pen was quick to say, her polling position made her the favorite to win the next presidential election in 2027. The verdict, barring her from running for office for five years, has all but ruled that out. In response, her National Rally colleague Jordan Bardella decried an “execution of French democracy,” and the party called for protests against “judicial dictatorship.” Sermonizing to a few thousand party devotees on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen denounced judges for “trampling on the rule of law.”

National Rally’s outrage is more than a little hypocritical. It has long played on other parties’ scandals to insist that it alone had “clean hands,” arguing that elite figures must be judged without fear or favor. In this case, Ms. Le Pen’s downfall was her own doing. It was delivered by judges seeking to better punish political misconduct and justified by recent legal reforms that stipulate mandatory bans for politicians convicted of abuse of office — a proscribing Ms. Le Pen had in fact called for earlier in her career. Now it has boomeranged against her. Really, she can have no complaints.

But this is a bigger story than Ms. Le Pen. Over the past decade, insurgent right-wingers have railed against corrupt political elites, from the Trumpian call to “drain the swamp” to the French far right’s damnation of the “political caste.” But when those forces themselves come under legal scrutiny, it’s like water off a duck’s back. Even the most damning rulings have had no effect on the support for far-right parties and leaders. If anything, they’ve seemed to help. Just look at President Trump, convicted of multiple felonies in the summer and elected to the presidency in the fall.

Embezzlement and polarizing legal decisions aren’t new, of course. But the crisis of Western democracy, most fundamentally, is about voters’ perception that decisions are taken out of their hands. Whatever the merits of each case, courts banning candidates is more likely to speed this sentiment than to slow it. Wrongdoers should be held to account whatever their political popularity. Yet unfavorable court decisions, we should know by now, aren’t going to stop the world’s Trumps.

Sure enough, Ms. Le Pen’s admirers soon spun the ruling as a tale of malicious muzzling. It was, Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social, a “witch hunt” and an example of “lawfare.” But this was not an instance of activist judges arbitrarily abusing their position to strike down the top-rated candidate. Though the sentence is severe, comparable bans have been given to politicians of different stripes in recent years, including for financial crimes far smaller in scale. Yet whatever the facts of the matter, the effect has been to turn Ms. Le Pen into a martyr rather than focus public attention on her party’s criminality.

A similar process is playing out in Romania. After a far-right ultranationalist candidate, Calin Georgescu, topped the first round of the presidential election last fall, the results were annulled over alleged campaign finance violations and TikTok’s promotion of his candidacy. In March, the Constitutional Court barred Mr. Georgescu from running again. Elon Musk, speaking for an enraged global right, had labeled the court’s head “a tyrant, not a judge.” In the end, the ban was a blow to the candidate, not to the cause. Another self-described Trumpist candidate, George Simion, now has a strong poll lead for May’s rescheduled contest.