Should Le Pen be barred? What is the Left’s right answer on this conundrum?

This is a crucial conversation to have in general, not particularly about Marine Le Pen. It is about the principled position that the democratic Left must take on the question of who has the right to remove the political rights (the right to vote and to seek votes) of whom.

We know what can happen when political rights can be rescinded by the courts en masse – just look at the distortions in the American political system caused by the loss of political rights of ex-convicts, a huge portion of America’s working class – especially of Black Americans.

• We know how progressive Presidents in Latin America have been targeted with lawfare, from Rafael Corea to Lula, with catastrophic effects for their people.

• And we have seen how the pathetic legal efforts to prevent Trump from running made a terrible thing grow impossibly worse.

But let me narrow this down by looking at Le Pen’s case in some detail. Three different questions arise in her case:

1st Question: What do we, the Left, want to see happen to Le Pen?

The obvious answer: We want to see her get crushed at the ballot box, in the polling stations. We want the masses to turn away from her and her merry authoritarian xenophobes. We want the likes of Le Pen, Trump, Musk and Orban to lose the discursive battle, politically, ethically – to fall from grace in the eyes of all decent, sensible people. We should be enjoying watching her hypocritical law-and-order policies being exposed: lest we forget, her party ran on an authoritarian law & order policy agenda of banning ankle bracelets in favour of incarcerating everyone at the drop of a hat – including Ms Le Pen, last week!

To recap, here is the gist of my first question: Does banning Ms Le Pen from participating in the next presidential elections help do any of this? Quite the opposite: the ban turns her into a pseudo-hero, it helps her portray herself as a victim and of democracy as a game that only the Radical Centre is allowed to win.

Of course, the fact that Le Pen and her mates of the global Nationalist International may benefit politically and morally from her ban does not, on its own, suggest that her ban is unjustified. More questions need to be answered before we get to that verdict. So, here is a second question:

2nd Question: Was Le Pen guilty of the charges? Did she improperly funnel resources from the European Parliament to her national headquarters?

I have no doubt she did. But, let me put this in context. MEPs are given dazzling sums of money to employ staff plus additional monies to fund political work in their home countries. To be precise, the staff allowance per MEP last year was set at €30,769 monthly. It is enough to hire an assistant, a researcher and a local constituency worker, and still have many thousands of euros left over. The residual monies are routinely sent to the national parties whose funding from the national parliament is always tighter. Cash strapped party leaders are known to oblige MEPs to do this. And, yes, some MEPs find ways to channel that excess to their relatives. I recall a centrist MEP once boasting that it was “common to employ one’s wife while sleeping with one’s staff”!

So, yes, Le Pen is probably guilty but of a crime so widespread in the European Parliament that singling her out, and only after she began leading opinion polls, smacks of a selective justice of the type that a genuine democrat will find hard to defend.

But, for argument’s sake, let’s agree that, even if it is selective justice, it must be carried out – that this was the case in front of the judges and that, therefore, they had no choice but to deliver a guilty verdict.

Two further issues arise: One concerns the indefensible use of so-called “provisional execution” clauses. In short, Le Pen was banned from the election before her appeals were heard. That’s how Lula was prevented from running in Brazil so that a rightist businessman could win (Nb. Plans that came to naught as the fascist Bolsonaro surprised both the Left and the Right to win). When, later, Lula’s appeal was heard and the charges dismissed when it was too late to stop Bolsonaro. Does the Left really want to say that the use of “provisional execution” is bad when used against ‘our’ people but quite alright when they are used against someone like Le Pen? That would be an inexcusable own goal.

The second issue is this: Should a conviction for any crime mean the loss of political rights? I think not. Political rights should never, under any circumstances, be suspended. This is, I am convinced, imperative. A principle worth fighting for. And one that, so far, is respected in most Anglosaxon jurisdictions. Who can forget Bobby Sands, the convicted IRA man, running for Parliament – and winning a House of Commons seat – from his Maze High Security Prison cell? Even Trump could have run for President in the United States had he been sent to jail by that New York judge. I think this is right and proper – and something that Europeans must embrace as a worthwhile principle.

Which leads me to my third and last question:

3rd Question: Should politicians be exempt from criminal charges just because they are running high in the polls?

Of course we should not. If Le Pen’s judges had guts, short of waiting for her appeals to be exhausted before removing her political rights, they should have thrown her in jail but not ban her from running in the elections. Letting her out of jail but banning her from running is a political gift to the enemies of democracy who can now claim, with some legitimacy, that democracy is a sham.

But what of a convicted murderer, you may ask. Should he or she be allowed to run for President from prison? Yes, I say, they should! “What if they win?”, you may then ask. “What do we do then? Let them take office?” Good question. Here is my answer: If, despite one’s conviction, one is elected, then the voters, the people – we – will have ended up with the delicious constitutional crisis that we deserve. No judge can, or should, resolve that.

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To conclude, political rights should never be left to judges. Anywhere. Ever. The moment you let the judiciary decide who can seek our votes, our oligarchies are bound to distort what little prospects of a democracy we have. No sensible progressive can “trust the courts” in an exploitative system for which the so-called separation of powers is at best a heroic assumption and at worst a ruse. It is as naïve as it is to believe in an independent central bank!

Anyone who cares about the democratic idea should be deeply worried with the ease with which the panicking Radical Centre bans an ultra-right opponent they think may beat them at the polls. Progressives, understandably, fear that the same courts and the same means will be used tomorrow to ban us. I agree. They will! In 2015 they shut down our banks to overthrow people like me, here in Greece. If that hadn’t worked, they would have tried to ban us from running for office – indeed, rightist lawyers tabled charges against me at Greece’s Parliament, just when I resigned the finance ministry. The charges? High Treason – the allegation being that I “undermined the national currency” which, comically, they identified as the… euro.

So, yes, we, the Left, have every reason to fear that what they are doing to Le Pen today they will most definitely do to us if we rise sufficiently in the polls. However, that should NOT be the principal reason why we oppose Le Pen’s ban, or of that clownish Georgescu’s ban in Romania. We should oppose these bans for deeper reasons: Because no one’s political rights should be rescindable. For any reason. Anywhere. Ever!

Having the guts to say that, especially in defence of the political rights of an abominable politician we should want to crush at the polls, is the litmus test for a radical democrat, for a Left worth its salt.