“Political death penalty”. This is how Marine Le Pen qualified the requisitions against her for a sentence of five years' imprisonment, including two years under electronic bracelet, a fine of 300,000 euros and five years of ineligibility with provisional execution. Recall that Mme Le Pen is presumed innocent in this affair of the European parliamentary assistants of the National Front (now National Rally, RN), for which twenty-five people are appearing for embezzlement of public funds.
At the exit of the courtroom another scene opened up, political and media. The privilege of elected officials is to be able to afford a platform whose magnitude is measured by their notoriety and depends on their desire to write the story of events to their advantage.
To arguments on the merits of the case, Marine Le Pen and her allies preferred to discredit the judicial authority, denouncing an attack on democracy, political justice, magistrates sometimes under orders, sometimes leftists.
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Certainly, we are accustomed to elected officials from all sides, when they are caught in legal turmoil, engaging in such rhetoric. But the deterioration in the quality of public debate has reached an unprecedented stage.
First marker, political leaders, who are not the proclaimed allies of the RN, affirmed that“it would be deeply shocking if Marine Le Pen were deemed ineligible”. There is no doubt that political forces clash in the political arena. But, with these words, they challenge the very principle of equality of all before the law. Because it is the violation of criminal law that is at issue in this trial and nothing else. Beyond undermining the separation of powers, such comments contribute to fueling citizens' distrust of the institutions of the Republic, as well as those supposed to serve the general interest.
Risk of reiteration
Second marker, these reactions carry uninhibited internal contradictions in which all logic is lost. It does not matter that it is incompatible both to reproach magistrates for being the “mouth of the law”, the very one which imposes, unless there is special motivation, the additional penalty of ineligibility, and to denounce a “government judges.” What does it also matter that these remarks are at odds with a political program advocating minimum sentences, going against the principle of individualization of sentences, and especially their immediate execution.
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