Nationalist and populist figures around the world, from Elon Musk to Viktor Orbán, have united in condemnation of a Paris court verdict barring Marine Le Pen from running in the country’s 2027 presidential elections.
In a bombshell ruling many believe could serve to boost support for the party, the figurehead of France’s far-right National Rally (RN) was sentenced on Monday to four years imprisonment – half suspended – and banned from running for public office for five years for embezzlement of European parliament funds.
Even if the legal evidence against her was substantial, the court’s ruling could prove highly divisive politically, potentially firing up Le Pen’s supporters – and even some of her opponents – just as Donald Trump’s legal problems motivated his.
The RN’s three-time presidential candidate, the frontrunner in many polls to succeed Emmanuel Macron in two years’ time, has said she will appeal against the decision, but her allies at home and abroad hit out as soon as the verdict was announced.
In the United States, where the vice-president JD Vance has attacked centrist European governments for “running in fear” of voters and suppressing democracy, Musk, a close adviser to the US president, said: “When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents. This is their standard playbook throughout the world.” He added: “This will backfire, like the legal attacks against President Trump.”
“Je suis Marine!” (“I am Marine”), Hungary’s illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orbán, posted in French on social media, referencing the rallying cry “Je suis Charlie” widely used in support after the 2015 Islamist attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine.
In the Netherlands, the far-right Freedom party (PVV) leader Geert Wilders said he was “shocked by the incredibly tough verdict … I support and believe in her for the full 100% and I trust she will win the appeal and become president of France.”
Tom Van Grieken of Belgium’s Vlaams Belang called the decision “an attack on democracy”, while Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party, posted: “They will never succeed to silence the voice of the French people.”
Many described the ruling as political. “Those who fear the judgment of the voters often find reassurance in the judgment of the courts,” said Italy’s deputy prime minister and the leader of the far-right League party, Matteo Salvini, said.
“In Paris they condemned Marine Le Pen and would like to exclude her from political life,” he said. Salvini added that the decision was “a declaration of war by Brussels” and “a bad film that we are also seeing in other countries such as Romania”.
Earlier this month Romania’s constitutional court upheld a decision to ban the far-right presidential election frontrunner Călin Georgescu from standing in a rerun of the vote in May after the initial result was annulled because of suspected Russian interference.
George Simion, Georgescu’s far-right replacement – who is also ahead in the polls – said of the Paris verdict: “Targeting or annihilating your political opponent by any means is straight out of the instruction manual of totalitarian regimes.”
In Moscow, the Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “more and more European capitals” were “trampling over democratic norms” and showing themselves “not at all reluctant to go beyond democracy during the political process”.
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Le Pen’s allies at home were equally damning. Jordan Bardella, the RN’s youthful president and Le Pen’s likely replacement if she cannot stand, said she was the victim of an “unjust” verdict and claimed French democracy was being “executed”.
Some conservative politicians also expressed their reservations about the impact of the ruling. Laurent Wauquiez of the centre-right Les Républicains (LR) said it it was “not healthy” for an elected official to be prevented from running in an election.
“Political debates must be settled at the ballot box and it is the French people who must decide,” Wauquiez, his party’s likely presidential candidate, said, adding that the court decision would “weigh heavily on the functioning of the French democracy”.
On the radical left, Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, said a “panicking illiberal establishment across the west” was “diving headlong into a totalitarian pit” and “France’s neofascists will only benefit from this”.
But Jürgen Hardt, a German conservative, said Le Pen had seen the EU as “a self-service store with which she could finance herself and her party”, adding her fate “should be a warning to all corrupt politicians on the left and right fringes”.
And German Green MEP Daniel Freund, the chair of the European parliament’s anti-corruption working group, said the court had “shown that the rule of law applies to everyone, regardless of polling numbers”.