Donald Trump has described the decision to disqualify Marine Le Pen from the 2027 French presidential election as a “witch-hunt”. In a social media post on Friday, issued hours after Emmanuel Macron had called for the suspension of investment in the USA, Trump turned his fire on France. He claimed the sentence handed down to Le Pen on Monday for misusing EU funds “is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech and censor their Political Opponent”. It was, said Trump, “so bad for France, and the Great French People, no matter what side they are on”. He ended his post by writing in capital letters “FREE MARINE LE PEN”.
The leader of France’s National Rally doesn’t need to be freed, as her four-year prison sentence was suspended, but she will have to cough up a €100,000 fine. The most devastating punishment for her, however, is the five-year term of political ineligibility. Her crime was to have misused EU funds between 2004 and 2016, not for personal enrichment, as the judge accepted, but to pay staffers to carry out work for the party.
It was a sentence few had anticipated. Prime Minister Francis Bayrou, who had been acquitted of similar charges last year, said he was “troubled” by the verdict. Amongst the world leaders who expressed their disquiet at the fact that France’s most popular politician won’t be able to contest the 2027 presidential election were Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orban. Elon Musk, Trump’s efficiency czar, also weighed in and like his president, pointed the finger of blame at the left. “When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents,” wrote Musk on social media. “This is their standard playbook throughout the world.”
Le Pen’s ban came less than a month after Calin Georgescu was excluded from Romania’s presidential election in May. Like Le Pen, Georgescu is a Eurosceptic anti-establishment candidate, and he is also popular. He won the first round of November’s first presidential election but before he could win the second, Romania’s Constitutional Court stepped in. Claiming interference from Russia — although they offered no concrete proof, other than some Russian activity on TikTok — they annulled the election and ordered a re-run in May. When opinion polls continued to give Georgescu a healthy lead, it was decided to remove him permanently from the contest.
The CDU consider the AfD, and by extension 1 in 5 German voters, beyond the pale
If the Romanian establishment believed the world wouldn’t bat an eyelid at this turn of events, they were mistaken. So, too, was Frenchman Thierry Breton, the EU Commissioner for the internal market between 2019 and 2024. Speaking in January — after the annulment of the Romanian presidential election and shortly before Germany’s parliamentary election — Breton boasted: “We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary.”
This remark was noted on the other side of the Atlantic, and it was referenced by American vice-president J.D. Vance when he spoke in February at the Munich Security Conference. “I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election,” said Vance. “He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too. Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears.”
They are also shocking to many European ears, as was the verdict handed down to Le Pen. Incidentally, Breton need not have worried. The anti-system Alternative for Germany [AfD] didn’t win the German election; they did come second, though they earned 21 per cent of the vote, seven per cent shy of the victorious CDU.
In a healthy democracy, the CDU would have turned to the AfD to form a coalition government; but Germany, like much of the EU (France, Holland, Spain and Austria, to name four other members where grubby coalitions keep right-wing or anti-system parties out of power) is not a healthy democracy. The CDU consider the AfD, and by extension 1 in 5 German voters, beyond the pale and so they invited the party that finished third, the Social Democrats, to form a coalition — this despite the fact that they had recorded their worst electoral performance since 1945. AfD co-leader Alice Weidel called the coalition “undemocratic”, adding: “You cannot exclude millions of voters per se.”
But they can, and they have, not just in Germany, but in Romania, France and also Austria, where the anti-immigration Freedom Party, who won last October’s election, have been excluded from the recently-formed coalition government of centrist parties.
Who are “they”? Contrary to what Trump and Musk think, it’s not the “radical left” who are leading the undemocratic charge across Europe. The judge who sentenced Le Pen does not appear to fall into this category. She was once a consultant for accountancy firm Ernst & Young, and in a 2020 interview she namechecked the former magistrate turned Green MEP Eva Joly as a role model.
“They” are what the French call the “Extreme Centre”. Emmanuel Macron described himself in these terms during an interview in 2022 when he broke down the French electorate into three blocks: the extreme left, the extreme right “and what I would describe as an extreme centre project, if you want to describe mine, in the central field. I think we need to think collectively, intellectuals on the one hand and politicians on the other, about reconsidering our democracy in terms of this relationship with radicalism, what I call this desire for purity”.
The European Union is their church
Students of French history will recall another politician obsessed with “purity” — Maximilien Robespierre, the progenitor of Progressivism.
In 2025, Progressives talk more about “values” than “purity”, but that is essentially what they mean: if you don’t share our values, you are impure. This is particularly true of environmental issues, LGTBQ rights and open borders.
Mass immigration is one issue that distinguishes some on the radical left from Extreme Centrists. The likes of Bernie Sanders and Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht are opposed to open borders because they recognise the damage it inflicts on the working-class.
The other common characteristic of European Progressivism is their devotion to the European Union. It is their church. The judgement on Marine Le Pen and her co-accused ran to 174 pages, and one paragraph in particular stood out: “The attack on the interests of the European Union is particularly serious in that it is carried out … by a political party that claims to be opposed to the European institutions.”
For Extreme Centrists, Euroscepticism is the heresy of the 21st century and the heretics must be cast into the wilderness, be they Le Pen, Georgescu, the AfD or Brexiteers. Remember what Donald Tusk — then the European Council President (and now Poland’s centrist PM) — said in 2019: that politicians who campaigned for Brexit deserved a “special place in hell”.
The French historian Pierre Serna, whose area of expertise is the Revolution, wrote a book in 2019 entitled: The Extreme Centre or the French Poison: 1789–2019.
He traced the history of this extremism, from Robespierre to Macron, and he concluded by writing: “It’s up to us to regain our political, cultural and social will, and to get out of this gentle but inexorable technostructure of the extreme centre, where politics is rejected, propaganda smiles and power is increasingly authoritarian.”
That hasn’t happened. Six years later France’s poison is seeping across Europe, and the continent is more authoritarian than ever.
