The next leader of the French right is probably somebody you’ve never heard of.
The Le Pen family has dominated the right wing of French politics for more than half a century, and, the closer they have come to seizing control of the Élysée, the more they have sucked the oxygen out of the room for any other challengers, as Éric Zemmour found to his misfortune in the 2022 presidential elections. Even Les Républicains, the closest analogue to Britain’s Conservative Party and the party of centre-right Gaullism, has struggled to find a space for itself between Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) and Emmanuel Macron’s liberal centre-left Renaissance (RE). But there is now the opportunity for a challenger to mimic Emmanuel Macron’s meteoric rise on the centre left and come from nowhere to seize power, unencumbered by the Le Pen name — if, that is, they are willing to act fast, be ruthless and be decisive.
This week, a Paris criminal court found Marine Le Pen guilty of misappropriating over EUR4m in EU funds between 2004 and 2016, intended for parliamentary assistants but used to pay RN staff for party work in France. The court sentenced the RN leader to a four-year prison term (two years suspended, two to be served under house arrest with an electronic ankle tag), a EUR100,000 fine and, crucially, a five-year ban on running for public office, with immediate effect. This final aspect of the sentence has enormous repercussions for the entirety of French politics, locking Le Pen out of running in the 2027 French presidential elections.
By going big on European elections, parties can put a large amount of party infrastructure spending on the EU payroll
Le Pen and her supporters have cried “maximalisme judiciaire” over the charge and the punishment handed down. They accuse the judiciary of expansive, aggressive and far-reaching interpretation of laws, and of pushing the boundaries of their authority in order to apply the harshest possible penalties, whilst timing the prosecution to inflict maximum political damage.
That many high profile French politicians have been subject to fraud investigations is by the bye in this instance (these include Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Fillon amongst many others). This is because Le Pen has been prosecuted under the beefed-up Loi Sapin II — a law “on transparency, the fight against corruption and the modernisation of economic life”. Enacted to strengthen existing anti-corruption measures, the Sapin II law includes provisions that can impose mandatory penalties, such as ineligibility for public office for certain offences involving public funds or corruption. Crucially, there were also changes made to the appeals process in these cases, and this is where the Le Pen affair diverges from the long and storied history of French fifth republic presidents and prime ministers being investigated for fraud and embezzlement without it ruining lunch too much. The usual merry dance in French politics is that a politician is accused and charged of a crime and drags out the appeals process long enough that they can time any sanctions brought for the least inconvenient moment. However, the 2016 law change bypassed this suspension of ineligibility penalties during the appeals process for serious offences, and the Paris court duly upheld prosecutors’ requests for a five-year ineligibility ban from eligibility for public office.
It’s not without irony that Le Pen’s RN party supported Sapin II when it was unanimously passed by the National Assembly in 2016, but that does not detract from some valid accusations from Le Pen and her supporters that the law was applied to its absolute fullest (including taking into the account the risks of recidivism), and was prosecuted at a time that would inflict maximum damage on her presidential ambitions.
Arguably, part of the murkiness of the affair comes from the informal role the European Parliament has played in supporting infrastructure building for challenger parties in a Europe where the business of politics is a far less cash-rich environment than the United States. As much as political parties across the spectrum like to attack the wastefulness of the European Union’s various institutions, they learned long ago that by going big on European elections they could put a large amount of party infrastructure spending on the EU payroll. Rather than funding the salaries of party hangers on, assistants and press officers directly from the party kitty, they could get as many bums on seats in the European Parliament as possible and have it all taken care of. It was also key to establishing headcount and legitimacy to parties locked out of power in domestic parliaments due to electoral mathematics failing to transform votes into seats. It is one of the great ironies that Nigel Farage’s UKIP party would have likely never been able to sustain itself in its long fight to push for Britain’s exit from the EU were it not for European funding. And the same approach has been key to helping RN maintain momentum — unencumbered by the two-round system that had hampered the Le Pens in their Presidential ambitions, it allowed the National Rally to achieve 30 seats at the last European Elections from 31.5 per cent of the vote share.
Any challenger to Le Pen needs to be able to sell the message to voters that the future is an exciting place
So far, all above board, even if not exactly what the European Parliament is strictly intended for. But it’s not hard to see where the Le Pen case has something of the UK’s MP expenses scandal about it. Getting a politician an MEP seat, office and assistants paid for on the EU dime — fine. Getting a politician an MEP seat, office and assistants paid for on the EU dime, and those assistants using a quiet afternoon to work on some party business — not fine. But you can very easily understand how a culture of permissiveness could take hold even if, to strain the comparison to breaking point, the EUR4m of funds Le Pen’s party is charged with misappropriating is a pretty fancy duck house. As such, Le Pen supporters have argued that since she didn’t personally receive financial gain from the EU funds, the sentence is overly harsh. But as many point out, you cannot be the party of law and order then cry foul when you are strictly punished for embezzlement of millions of euros.
So where does this leave the right in France? As things stand, the heir apparent remains the same as before the judgement — the 29-year-old MEP Jordan Bardella. Anyone who has seen him speak will be familiar with the sight of the camera panning to Marine Le Pen in the front row of the audience, nodding along and applauding at all the right points. But were Bardella the real deal and ready to go as a credible presidential candidate, then the party would not currently be in meltdown. He may be young, fresh and not technically a Le Pen — but he might as well be. After all, Bardella was until last year in a long-term relationship with Marine Le Pen’s niece Nolwenn Olivier, further strengthening the impression of the party as a family business. By mimicking the politics of his mentor, he will fall short in the same way that Marine Le Pen has done so in consecutive presidential elections — locking in RN deindustrialised heartlands but failing to make inroads into densely populated cities. In short, he’s the perfect illustration of why an unknown is best placed to sweep in and take control of the French right.
The challenger will need to make the right noises about the injustice of the Le Pen prosecution. They will need to campaign robustly and be combative about legal overreach and weaponisation of the judiciary, but tread carefully between mollifying RN’s staunch supporters and being sucked into the Le Pen orbit. But then they need to strike out on their own.
They will have a short window in which to act, since a Le Pen return is not impossible on appeal, and they need to establish themselves in anticipation.
Their stance on immigration is almost a given — the scale of immigration into Europe means that the candidate of any faction left or right will need to address this head on. But to reach the swathes of the electorate so far out of bounds to Le Pen, the candidate needs to offer something more than fear of migration and a return to the good times for her largely blue-collar supporters. They need to be able to sell the message to voters that the future is an exciting place, and that France will be a key player economically and culturally. Instead of uninspiring promises of a job on the same factory floor as their uncle, the right needs to be able to offer sharp metropolitan graduates a future of unshackled growth. The saviour of Nicholas, 30 is out there. But will they heed the call?
