Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time), I hope to be here for our regular midweek Clubland Q&A, taking questions from Mark Steyn Club listeners around the world. Before that, I'll be back tonight for the latest episode of our current Tale for Our Time.
~The French have been here before. In 1804, First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte, the Emmanuel Macron of his day (a short guy married to an older woman), ordered the seizure of a perceived political threat to his regime, the Duc d'Enghien. When Joseph Fouché, Minister of Police, learned that M le Duc had been executed in a moat, he observed, "C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est un faute" - it's worse than a crime, it's a mistake. (The remark is often attributed to Talleyrand, but I incline to Fouché.)
Yet the cynical police chief was wrong: two months later the First Consul made himself Emperor (as Macron is planning to do in late May), and the dead duke was forgotten.
The judicial vaporisation of the Leader of the Opposition is certainly a crime, but will it also prove a mistake? So far, the French media coverage of the republic's latest "political" developments has been true to form. From France 24:
A French court handed far-right leader Marine Le Pen a five-year ban on running for office on embezzlement charges Monday...
From Le Monde:
Marine Le Pen's 2027 presidential bid in jeopardy after court bans far-right leader from running in elections
Mme Le Pen has not been banned because she is too "far right", but because she is too near. She has topped every presidential poll of the last two years, which suggests the real problem for the so-called "mainstream" is that the "far" right isn't far enough: it occupies an ever increasing chunk of the political spectrum, including on any map of the republic most of the national territory outside a few big Macronist cities. A week ago, Madame hit thirty-seven per cent: if that held on the big day, it would be the best result of any candidate in the first round of any presidential election since 1974.
So a judge removed her from the ballot. As Donald Trump's enemies see it, the only mistake they made was not gaoling him before the election. The French state has learned from that, and drawn the same conclusion.
A couple of things can be said:
1) No Continental leader worked harder than Marine Le Pen at "de-demonising" her party from the "far right" brand. Which, in her case, included expelling the party's founder, who happened to be her own father.
And yet they got her anyway.
And so it will go.
2) The cause of her disqualification is not to be taken seriously. The "embezzlement" conviction arises from an European Union practice whose principal purpose - like so much else in the remnants of the west - is as a means of control. The European Parliament pays for its members' "aides", who are supposed to work only on Euro-matters. So suppose the head of your national party back in the old country comes into town and you send the aide to meet him at the station and drive him back to the office. In theory, you have committed something capable of being interpreted as a crime - or at least as what American lawyers call "co-mingling". As Trump learned in the New York courts, there are enough "grey areas" that, when they need to fit you up (as the Brits say), there will always be something.
So this particular "crime" is being almost constantly charged against someone or other according to their political pliability. For example, M Macron's latest prime minister beat the rap on an identical charge that convicted almost all the chap's less senior associates. The PM in question - they come and go so fast - is generally agreed to be guilty, and his acquittal is currently being appealed by the prosecutor. But that's no obstacle to serving as prime minister until his government self-destructs in six weeks or whatever.
Not until now has this pseudo-crime been used to take out the most popular politician in the country. For the first time in the Fifth Republic, the Leader of the Opposition will be placed under an assignation à résidence avec surveillance électronique, or what French law enforcement calls an "ARSE". That's to say, for two years Marine Le Pen will be under house arrest and forced to wear an ankle bracelet - just like her fellow criminal Adel Kermiche, although in his case the gendarmes turned off the electronic tag for a couple of hours a day to allow M Kermiche a bit of privacy, in the course of which he decapitated Père Hamel during Mass. You might conclude that French law enforcement are the real ARSEs, but they're unlikely to make the same mistake with Mme Le Pen.
She intends to appeal her "conviction". But legal scholars are now explaining to us, with impressively straight faces, that, thanks to the backlog of cases, any appeal will not be heard for two years, if she's lucky, and therefore is likely to come too late to restore her to the 2027 presidential ballot. Have leading analysts of the printing industry also explained that, due to the backlog of printing jobs, proofs for the next presidential ballot have to be signed off on by ...oh, too late, it was last Thursday.
So, very conveniently, the leading political candidate has now been removed from the election. My friend Tammy Bruce, speaking for the Trump Administration, said:
Exclusion of people from the political process is particularly concerning given the aggressive and corrupt lawfare waged against President Trump here in the United States.
Just so. The right of individuals to offer themselves for election is as basic a prerequisite for democracy as you can get. That applies whether you're at 51 per cent or 0.51 per cent in the polls. But the establishment's willingness, from America to Romania, to use judges to take out the leading candidate is especially brazen, and says nothing good about their attitude to government by the people.
Beyond that, the notion that the citizenry has the right to choose its leaders is increasingly qualified: in Germany, a fifth of MPs (from parties with less public support) voted to ban the AfD; while in Italy, the Senate voted to prosecute Matteo Salvini, the deputy PM, for "kidnapping" when he prevented an NGO from rescuing a shipful of migrants. In Romania, the courts annulled last year's presidential election results - and then, when the ingrate masses refused to get the message, banned the leading candidate, Călin Georgescu. At least, the eminent jurists felt obliged to come up with an explanation for eighty-sixing Mr Georgescu (Russian interference). They provided no explanation at all for banning a second candidate, Diana Șoșoacă, from both last year's nullified election and this year's substitute vote.
Sir Keir Stürmer is subtler about these things: he decided to cancel this year's local elections in nine counties in order to allow for government "reorganisation" in those areas. So no elections will be held until next year, maybe, or even later, if necessary, depending on how thorough all this "reorganisation" is.
Get used to a lot more of this. Has Tony Blair's chum, that central banker of no fixed abode parachuted into Sussex Drive and just discovering that there are parts of Canada where nobody speaks Canadian, decided that certain problematic ridings could use a little "reorganisation"?
I know some readers dislike the way I always say "as I always say". Nevertheless, as I always say, our betters are determined that no change can be permitted on anything that matters - not least the surrender of the most agreeable nation states on the planet to the barbarian invasions. The sole purpose of politics is to provide some lame-o dinner-theatre cover for that: Scholz/Merz, Sunak/Starmer, Jeb/Hillary... That's all the choice anyone needs. The "firewall" against broader choices is increasingly unfeasible, so judges have to be pressed into service to provide a fig-leaf of legitimacy to a rigged system, and the jurists from Bucharest to Washington seem happy to play along. So "government by the people" dwindles down, nation by nation, to government by the permitted people, which is not quite the same thing. One recalls the current US Health Secretary's late uncle:
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
I certainly hope that's true - because, across the west, the consistent message is: you're not going to be able to vote your way out of this.
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