“The only thing that interests the prosecution is Marine Le Pen and the National Rally,” reacted the party boss after the prosecutor's requisitions claiming against the 27 defendants tried in the case of the RN parliamentary assistants until to five years in prison, more than 3 million euros in compensation and penalties of ineligibility. An “outrageous” response, according to Marine Le Pen, who minimizes the accusations of embezzlement of 4.5 million euros of public money.
Like her, the RN executives invoke a “political trial” which seeks to “ruin the party” and above all to exclude the MP, already a candidate for the Élysée three times, from the next presidential election. “For many voters, this trial seems like political persecution and it will reinforce the impression that the political caste and the elites want to try to stop a phenomenon which can no longer be contained at the ballot box,” believes political scientist Jean- Yves Camus.
The release of Jordan Bardella's book, scheduled in the middle of the RN trial, fueled this accusation of “separate treatment” of the far right. In accordance with its regulations, the advertising agency rejected the planned poster campaign. “When they say 'we must ban the book by the president of the RN', I find myself at the top of sales on Amazon,” reacted the young leader.
Victimization, a historical refrain
This strategy of victimization is in reality a historical refrain of the extreme right. “In 1945, with the Purge and the Nuremberg trials, far-right ideas were no longer opinions but calls for hatred which referred to fascism. For this reason, nationalist activists have long been sidelined from public debate,” admits Jonathan Preda, historian with a doctorate from the French Institute of Geopolitics. “From then on, far-right movements point to “the system” which opposes them, and the media which would silence them. By claiming non-conformism and a form of courage to ''stand up against the elites'', to the ''dominant doctrine'', as Éric Zemmour repeats, the far right has changed its image. By asserting themselves as victims, they present themselves as resistance fighters. Including currently, even though they are now very present and sometimes even dominant in the media and on social networks. »
The man who founded the National Front and led the movement to its first electoral successes, Jean-Marie Le Pen, played this card for a long time, complaining at each media appearance of being shunned by the media. However, it was in front of the cameras, in 1999, that he attacked a socialist candidate in a market in the Ile-de-France region. Violence for which he was then judged and threatened, like his daughter today, with a sentence of ineligibility which could have prevented him from running for the 2002 presidential election. After appeal and cassation appeal, the judges had finally reduced his sentence to one year of ineligibility, which allowed him to run and qualify the far right in the second round against Jacques Chirac.
At the time, the leader of the National Front denounced “criminal justice”. “It is only in totalitarian countries that the courts are responsible for eliminating political adversaries of power,” he said at the time. The removal of a politician who twice collected several million votes, of a parliamentarian, I find that scandalous…” A fairly similar argument emerges today in the defense of Marine Le Pen, who presses the exception of judicial treatment reserved for the RN. However, there have been precedents.
In 2004, Alain Juppé, president of the UMP (now Les Républicains), was sentenced to fourteen months in prison and one year of ineligibility in the case of fictitious jobs at the RPR and Paris City Hall. In the case of the MoDem parliamentary assistants, François Bayrou was initially sentenced to a sentence of ineligibility, lifted on appeal.
In the name of the people
“Ineligibility for execution is a political death sentence,” proclaims Marine Le Pen. But she qualifies her criticisms: she does not aim at justice in its entirety, but points out the impartiality of certain magistrates. “The 'red judges', who would be ultra-politicized and left-wing of course, constitute another figure brandished by the extreme right against the cultural elites… – the basis of populism, analyzes the historian. The far right claims to represent the 'real country', the theory of Charles Maurras, in opposition to the legal or moral country, the famous 'system'. When the RN executives repeat ''our ideas are popular, we are the first party in France, so we must not condemn Marine Le Pen'', this clearly means ''we are above the rule of law'' '”.
Across the Atlantic, last spring, Donald Trump was found guilty of hidden payments to a pornographic actress. The former tenant of the White House immediately denounced a “rigged” trial, a “disgrace”, and assured that the “real verdict” would fall on November 5, the day of the presidential election… We know the rest.
The petition that the National Rally launched to support Marine Le Pen collected more than 250,000 signatures in one week. Not at all to put pressure on justice, assures the MP, but rather to demonstrate that it benefits from the support of the sovereign people. “There was real indignation among the French people after the violence of these requisitions,” she said. According to political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, “we have a party which still behaves like a marginal party, located on the fringes of politics, while saying that tomorrow it can assume power, that it is a party of alternation” .
In Hungary with Viktor Orbán, in Italy with Giorgia Meloni, in Brazil with Jair Bolsonaro, the far right and radical right parties have taken this path of victimization to gain power. It remains to be seen whether this strategy is sustainable over time.
