France Comes Down With the American Disease

Has France been paying attention? Criminal prosecution against a leading politician — a malady known in America as “lawfare” — is surfacing in France. That’s where the rightist Marine Le Pen, head of the increasingly popular party, National Rally, was just convicted for misusing public funds. Even the leftists at Jacobin magazine warn that this could backfire by providing “a propaganda coup for her party.”The magazine’s David Broder, a critic of rightist movements in Europe, points to claims by Madame Le Pen’s defenders that the conviction marks “an assault by ‘elites’ on democracy itself,” and “a government attack on the main opposition party.” Mr. Broder calls this “overstated” and avers that “no one is above the law.” Yet even so, he concedes that “banning candidates from running for office due to financial crimes is highly dubious.”America’s own experiment with lawfare, largely conducted by the Democrats during President Biden’s tenure in the White House and against his leading GOP opponent, President Trump, vindicates Mr. Broder’s point. The attempt by the Democrats to jail Mr. Trump over what struck many as picayune accusations — like fudging corporate records to cover over hush money payments to an adult film actress — helped fuel the president’s comeback.The charges against Madame Le Pen, Mr. Broder suggests, are cut from similar cloth. The accusations are that she used for National Rally activities funds that were meant to be used for her party’s members of the European Parliament. If you have access to an electron microscope, see if you can spot the infraction. This kind of “reliance on parliaments and public funds to finance political activism,” Mr. Broder reports, “is also increasingly normal.”A more serious implication, Mr. Broder adds, is that Madame Le Pen’s “party is being stifled by politically motivated ‘lawfare.’” That charge, he adds, “seems well-designed to galvanize its base.” His insight is echoed by France’s minister of justice, Gérald Darmanin, who had earlier warned that barring Madame Le Pen from running for office would be “deeply shocking.” A critic of the National Rally, he urged her defeat “at the ballot box, not elsewhere.”France, in any event, is the latest country to fall prey to a global epidemic identified by these columns as “the American disease.” It’s an illness that has afflicted Israel, too, as seen in the politically-inflected indictments in 2019 of Prime Minister Netanyahu. In clinical terms, the condition was defined in the newsroom of The New York Sun as “an infection of the democratic process by criminal law.” Lawfare, the Sun has warned, “can bring down even the most heroic politicians. It may yet prove fatal to great nations.” One of the most insidious aspects of this condition is knowing where to draw the line between the rough and tumble of politics and actual violations of the law meriting state intervention. Feature, say, the decision by Romanian officials to exclude a rightist politician, Călin Georgescu, from that country’s presidential race.Mr. Georgescu is adamant that the charges are but “a copy paste of the accusations made against Donald Trump.” Vice President Vance groused about Romania having “just annulled an entire election,” and asked if European elites were “running in fear” from voters. Yet a closer look at Mr. Georgescu’s case raises questions about Russian interference in a former Soviet satellite, and the exclusion seems less a threat to democracy than the case of Madame Le Pen.Then there’s the case of Turkey, which is cited by our Michel Gurfinkiel in his column on the conviction of Madame Le Pen. Turkey just jailed the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, leading contender in a presidential contest against the incumbent strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The arrest of Mr. Imamoglu appears to be about as egregious an example of lawfare as they come, and it raises fears over the state of Turkey’s democracy.Then, too, there are questions afoot in Germany, where the rightist Alternative für Deutschland just came in second place in legislative elections after the liberal establishment weighed whether to ban the party outright. The National Rally’s Jordan Bardella, Madame Le Pen’s possible successor, seems to have the right idea, prescribing a “peaceful mobilization” against France’s outbreak of lawfare. He concludes: “let’s show them that the will of the people is stronger.”

France Comes Down With the American Disease

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