The European populist right has been at the top of the political agenda in recent days.
On July 7, everyone in France was waiting expectantly for a Paris appeal court to decide on whether Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Rassemblement National (RN), would be allowed to run in the 2027 presidential election after her conviction for embezzlement of European funds.
But just as the European media machine was gearing up for the verdict, across the Channel, Nigel Farage – the leader of Reform UK – announced on X that he would be making a “statement about his future”. This came after multiple allegations of undeclared gifts and an ongoing investigation into possible money laundering. Farage maintains that he has done nothing wrong.
The parallels were impossible to ignore. Here were two prominent European populist rightwing politicians whose political careers were being threatened by extensive and well-documented corruption claims. How would they respond?
We did not have to wait long to find out. Only hours after the verdict, Le Pen announced that she was now officially a candidate for the 2027 presidential election. Despite the fact that her initial conviction was upheld on appeal, she intends to contest the appeal court’s decision. This means she retains her presumption of innocence and is able to proceed with her election campaign as if nothing happened.
It is a remarkable sleight-of-hand; Le Pen has found the narrowest of legal loopholes through which to pass. In her announcement, she presented her decision as a democratic one: the French people should judge her, not the courts.
In the meantime, Farage told his supporters that he is stepping down from his parliamentary seat of Clacton after being made the subject of a parliamentary inquiry into his alleged improprieties. This will trigger a byelection – but, in an equally remarkable gambling act, he plans to run himself in the hope of winning back his seat. Again, he is suggesting that this means letting the voters decide whether he is guilty or not.
Le Pen and Farage are both reading from a well-thumbed playbook. The people v the courts; voters v judges; the “transparent” legitimacy of the ballot box v the “opacity” of lengthy legal and regulatory proceedings. All of these tropes will be familiar to observers of populist politics in the United States, Hungary or Turkey.
The bigger question is: do voters care whether populist politicians break the rules? Le Pen and Farage are hoping that, like Donald Trump, they can simply swat aside legal and regulatory processes on the road to their ultimate electoral triumph.
Question of standards
There are many reasons to take Le Pen and Farage’s arguments with a pinch of salt. A closer analysis of the relationship between the populist right and corruption reveals a more complicated picture, perhaps especially in France, which is gearing up for its most important electoral cycle in 2027.
At face value, Le Pen has little to worry about since French politics is famously corrupt. Every French president of the Fifth Republic, except Charles de Gaulle and Emmanuel Macron, has a major corruption scandal to their name. Both Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy have been found guilty of corruption by French courts. They have been joined by countless MPs and mayors over the years who have been convicted of similar crimes.
Until recently, this level of corruption was widely tolerated. French voters largely accepted that politicians would embezzle money, employ their family members on the public purse, or swing large public contracts for their benefit. They were more concerned with ideological faultlines than political integrity – and they displayed little of the hand-wringing that accompanied equivalent scandals like Watergate in the US in the 1970s or the “cash-for-questions” affair in the UK in the 1990s.
Yet this tolerance has begun to dissipate in recent years. Public anger towards politicians has reached unprecedented levels, most notably in recent protest movements such as the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests), and the deep personal hostility many French voters feel towards Macron.
Le Pen and the RN have provided a highly effective electoral outlet for this anger, and they have made much of their commitment to probity in public office. Le Pen even said herself that she would not run for election while wearing an electronic tag, and for many years the party campaigned for politicians found guilty of corruption to be banned from public office for life.
Rocky road to the Elysée Palace
But Le Pen and the RN’s role as standard-bearers of the “ordinary” French person’s rage against a “rigged” and “corrupt” political system is now under threat. By effectively stamping her dynastic authority on the party that was previously run by her father, and by blocking the rise of her young protege Jordan Bardella, Le Pen has boxed herself into a corner.
Her only way out is by the ballot box. Yet the chances of her winning the presidential election remain slim. She – and her party – lack the necessary support to win in the second round of the elections where vote transfers from eliminated parties and candidates determine the overall result, and she still suffers from a credibility deficit in comparison to more mainstream politicians.
She may well have made matters worse by giving her opponents a powerful stick with which to beat her. Even in France, accusations of corruption can be hard to shake off. And, as Le Pen and Farage know from long experience, it is just as possible to lose at the ballot box as it is to win.
Emile Chabal, Professor of Contemporary History, University of Edinburgh
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.