Marine Le Pen banned from running in 2027 and given four-year sentence

Is that true of criminal law? (Genuine question, I know zilch about European criminal law.) Does French law have the concept of prosecutorial discretion?

Comon law proved to be more adaptable to different customs and cultures. Almost all of frances colonies sank into lawless despotism. Meanwhile many english colonies are or were vibeant lawruled democracies, even while beeing poor .

The voting system (FPTP) in the US results in a two party system which isn't representative of a good democratic system imo. Considering all of the different political divides I don't think two parties sufficiently cover the spectrum of opinions/stances.

Maybe we just need to stop quitting and capitulating, and commit to our liberty and self-determination. Prior generations committed their 'lives, fortunes, and honor'. We just need to fix social media, which will take an activated society.

Are you prepared to give several Trump appointed judges prosecutorial discretion over who can run in the midterms and 2028?

The problem that prosecutorial discretion will have to overcome is selective enforcement, or the perception thereof. The right wing European media is claiming this was common practice across parties. Now I don't know the truth of it, but it is a hard thought to get out of ones head, and a hard negative to prove.

wrt Le Pen, I find it noteworthy that evey English news article I have read avoids describing the actual crime [1], Which does seem more substantial than 99% of the Trump cases.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2024/09/30/w...

Quite the opposite! Democracy is working in America, whereas it’s in jeopardy in (some parts of) Europe. You’re confusing “democracy” with “liberalism.” Democracy is not about free trade, or protecting immigrants, or the like. It’s about people being able to vote to live in the kind of society they want. If people want to pull back on liberalism in certain areas that’s democratic. What’s undemocratic is saying that “you can vote for anything you want as long as it’s liberalism.”

There’s a reaction throughout the entire west to free trade and immigration. In America, a plurality of voters supported the guy who promised mass deportations and tariffs, and now they’re getting exactly what they voted for. Maybe they won’t like the results, maybe they’ll be thrilled with them. The results will simply inform the next vote. What’s deeply broken are european systems that are trying to maintain liberalism at the expense of democracy.

But not all the european countries. Denmark and Sweden have retrenched on liberalism in the area of immigration—Denmark’s youngest generation is now more Danish than the population as a whole—and have largely solved the political polarization over the issue. That’s democracy working very well.

I mean that, in general, criminal laws can be interpreted to take minor wrongdoings and turn them into serious crimes. I’m not saying that was the case with Le Pen.

In fact, I think the conflict between law enforcement and politics in the Le Pen case is largely self-inflicted. There was no need to include the constraint on running for office in the punishment. And it seems like the wrongful conduct ended in 2017. Why did it take so long to work through to a verdict?

> That is a problem, yet the law must still be enforced.

Tellingly, you’re phrasing that in the passive voice, as if “the law” is “enforced” by higher beings sitting outside the political process. It is not. The enforcement of criminal laws is a political act, performed by political actors. And it is an inherently discretionary political act. Prosecutors actually have no obligation to enforce the law in every circumstance.

> There is no perfect solution but that isn't an argument for lawlessness, especially for powerful political leaders.

It’s not an argument for lawlessness, but rather an argument for viewing the political act of law enforcement as being secondary to the ultimate political act of electing leadership in any scenario where those two things could be seen as being in conflict.

Put differently, you have to see prosecution and elections as political acts that both seek to vindicate the will of the people. After all, criminal prosecutions are brought on behalf of the People to vindicate the public interest in law and order, not private rights. So it’s perfectly legitimate to ask whether, under particular circumstances, it’s more important to enforce some criminal law—especially one unrelated to elections—or whether it’s more important to ensure the public can choose its leaders through elections.

Another one with Cahuzac: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_Cahuzac#:~:text=En%20m...

Don't remember the right whining about how ineligibility is undemocratic with this one (Cahuzac is left leaning)

But what is gained from barring people convicted of a crime from holding public office?

- Keeping people out with questionable character?

- Preventing crimes from being committed while in office?

Neither of those are all that convincing. Voters will be aware of the criminal past of any candidate. They can make their own personal judgement when they vote.

And I’m not sure what you mean by democracy has “worked well in that regard except for the US”.

If your goal is to ban people with criminal records to prevent corruption, there are plenty of democracies with a far worse track record when it comes to democracy than the US.

You're absolutely right. My fault. I should have checked what I read. Unfortunately, I cannot change the original comment any longer. In any case, given their involvement in embezzlement the Front National/Rassemblement National would likely not vote for laws against corruption.

- Russian Federation is technically a democracy.

- Belarus, same thing.

- Ukraine, same thing.

They're all in Europe, too.

- Israel, where the Netanyahu's trial is commonly seen (by both sides!) as a way to prevent Netanyahu from serving as the PM.

- Arguably, US with the Trump conviction.

These are the ones I'm personally aware of, it's more than likely there are better examples.

(In a "no true scotsman" way of thinking, it's easy to debunk any such cases by saying they're bad examples of a democracy. Then again, it's the same argument with any political system — proponents of communism will say that communism was never implemented properly, for example.)

The headline really should be Le Pen guilty of embezzlement, ineligible to run for public office for X years.

Seems like a reasonable policy we should adopt in the US…

The Wikipedia article has "deprival of the rights of individuals and parties from running for election" listed as a method. So I assume the prison/fine part of the sentencing wouldn't really be defensive democracy but barring her from office is. (Don't think I would feel positively about that in the U.S. but nonetheless the concept is there.)

Applying the laws regardless of if that person is a political candidate.

Hehe, now let’s wait and see how they grapple with the fact that you can’t have both! It‘s either criminal use of EU funds or defensive democracy, unless you’re drenched in kool-aid.

You are just confused because you bought the democracy fairy tale. There is no "real" democracy. There are nation states and in this case it is the French nation state. Politicians come and go but the state (also known for some reason as the deep state) made of bureaucrats, military personal, intelligence, etc... are not going to let some random dude rule over the country just because he got 50%+ of the population electing him. That's the pipe dream of democracy but not the reality.

A lot of words to say "I do not agree with the judgement of a fair and independet court because I feel otherwise".

>Does that sound like the kind of stuff that fair, well run by rule of law, stable democracies with lots of buy in from the populace do to you?

...Yes?

Or are you saying politicians can just barge in and say "the rules don't apply to me because I'm popular"? Because that's how you don't get stable democracies. What you get is Trump, or the Red Brigades, or the Brown Shirts running things to the ground. Because the motto of those orgs is "one man, one vote... One last time"

The Romania-ization of European democracies has just begun. Once Brussels sends „democracy-protecting“ tanks into the capitals of its member states, the „EU-SSR-meme“ will have successfully completed the „conspiracy“ life cycle we‘ve become so adjusted to lately (conspiracy > meme > reality). Just remember to, in the meantime, de-humanize every complainer as „Putin-Puppet“ because how else can we protect democracy if not by eliminating dissent, eh?

That's a very charitable way of explaining away literally anything.

Let me try:

It's not like Putin started a war, but rather some officials trusted the electorate at some level and decided that the rules the electorate chose to make via their representatives should be followed. The representatives being Putin and friends. Those officials also trust the electorate to change the rules if they want to.

There were no actual attempts at a coup btw, so the electorate is evidently happy with this.

That's where it gets tricky.

Ultimately, rules come from the people in a democracy.

If they decide they want a candidate who broke the rules, that's where it gets messy in political philosophy.

Should the democratic will of the people from years ago or decades ago override the democratic will of the people now? Of course that's the general idea of having constitutions and such, but it can only ever be a matter of degree, and there's no right answer as to how much.

> For democracy to work properly politicians need to follow the rules.

Democracy doesn't require that, except for a narrow subset of rules relating to voting and things like that.

The system you're describing isn't even democracy--it elevates lawyers and judges above the voters. Think about it: if there was a class of people you could trust to neutrally administer and enforce "the rules" then you wouldn't need multiple branches of government, separation of powers, etc. You could just make rules for everything, and trust the neutral arbiters to enforce those rules in politically neutral ways.

The problem is when rules don't apply the same to all politicians.

Allowing some people to be above the law is a bad idea in general. Selecting elected officials to be above the law in particularly is ill-thought-out, IMO. Perverse incentives abound . Elections shouldn't be a get-out-of-jail card.

I disagree. Why should only EU positive parties get funding? Seems highly undemocratic to me.

Are other parties allowed to use the funds for staffers and was it considered embezzlement in this case based on a determination of party policy?

If so, this seems crazy to me.

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That argument makes sense in most cases. If the candidate is a rapist, voters can and should be the ones to disqualify them.

But this is a case of cheating. If a candidate cheats in an election, that should disqualify them because otherwise the election is tainted.

The appeals process is the standard here.

You aren’t the first person to have the thought you are expounding above.

Say the person who the public vote for is in prison (and to make it "easier", prior to running for office. Or maybe they were a write-in).

That decision should lie with the voters, you say.

So which takes precedence? Prison, where they are serving a sentence? Or the democratic role?

After all, the same public, using their democratic rights, voted for a system in which that person was sentenced to prison.

So which vote is more important? The vote that says that "X is a crime, and if you are justly convicted, the sentence is Y"? Or the vote that says "If I want you to be our leader, that's more important than that previous application of justice"?

> Liberal democracies are build on the principle that no institution is beyond corruption.

It's an ontological issue, if everyone is potentially compromised, how do you know anything ? It's also leveraged by biased medias to discredit old institutions and suddenly no more counter powers..

Only one political party, namely, the far right, has argued that the courts should be politicized and used to punish their political opponents.

This is super dangerous “both sides”-ism.

Only one side is trying to do what you think “those in power” do.

Nazis will argue up and down about their right to free speech, right up until the moment they are in power. And guess what happens then?

Judges sitting in those courts are not politicians elected to take decisions weighted by how their constituents will like them and reelect them, but people who've studied law and its application (unlike politicians who can be anyone), who have been vetted by peers for their capacity to be law "technicians", and whose job is to "apply" the law, whether they disagree with it or not.

That's the concept of the separation of powers. Of course judges will have opinions and can never truly be objective (no such thing exists anyway), but their main job is to apply the law. And the concept of appeal and (in France) "cassation", which meana judgment can be revised up to two times, are there so that no single judge ruling can be definitive in isolation.

If politicians can use the judicial system to ban political opponents, the system is broken and powers are not separated in the right way. And I'll definitely not say that France has a perfect separation (the president concentrate a lot more than it should), but it's still there and this wasn't such a case (in the past two years, Le Pen and the RN is the group that Macron has been willingly compromising with and letting arbitrate a lot of stuff)

>Why shouldn't the public be able to elect whoever they want?

Because some types of illegal behaviour of candidates can influence the vote.

This isn't about a court banning MLP because of her views or policy proposals (that would be very bad) but because she has been show to have comitted fraud by abusing EU money to pay for her own party.

Unlike in the US there are strict rules in France about how much politicians can spend on campainging and where the funds can come from that are intended to ensure a level playing field rather than favouring rich candidates.

If courts couldn't ban candidates who don't respect the rules then elections could be "bought" illegaly.

Illinois / NJ governor?

Agreed, my bad.

At least in France, the courts are independent of the executive.

Courts already have the power to fine and jail people.

The problem is not the power. The problem is the politicisation.

Everything has the potential to be a slippery slope. That potential doesn't seem like a good reason to abandon the idea of standards for our leaders.

The Romanian justice system didn’t rule the candidate out because “the current government didn’t like him”.

Where do you get your information, Fox News?

It was because of grievous breaches of campaign financing. The kind of thing that brings the integrity of their electoral system at serious risk.

It's relevant that the corruption charges against Erdoğan's opponent are obviously trumped-up, whereas the ones against Le Pen are entirely legitimate.

I think Democrats are doing a disservice by not pushing back harder against Trump’s attacks on judges and his calls for their impeachment. The judiciary is one of the few remaining institutions that can check executive overreach, and defending it should be a top priority.

More broadly, I believe Democrats would gain much more support if they focused on a few key issues—ones that have broad consensus and appeal to independents—and pursued them with laser focus. Instead, they tend to chase after every single distraction Trump throws their way, which only plays into his strategy.

> by "putting pressure on the judiciary branch" as you said to find their opponent guilty.

In a court of law in the US, a jury decides whether someone is guilty or not guilty in criminal cases.

> Last I checked Rosie O'Donnell is only one stupid enough to imply that the latest presidential election was not completely above tye board.

The MAGA cult was complaining about it until it became obvious they did not lose the elections.

You do understand that this is explicitly mandated by the law and only in special cases can this be lifted (and here the judge mentioned the lack of remorse or admission from the defendant was a deciding factor for this)? Here is a reference for that: https://www.vie-publique.fr/questions-reponses/297965-inelig...

And why are your feelings relevant to the French legal system?

There are all kinds of eligibility rules, you think they shouldn't exist?

By your logic, Trump should be allowed to run for a 3rd term right?