The National Rally (RN) communication strategy has found widespread support within the political class following Marine Le Pen’s conviction on Monday, 31^st March, for misappropriation of public funds. Aside from embarrassed silences, criticisms of the judicial decision, the majority of reactions have validated the far-right party’s line, which denounces a “democratic scandal”.

Whilst officially maintaining media silence, the executive leaked its disapproval of this judicial decision in the afternoon. François Bayrou’s entourage, himself implicated in a parliamentary assistants case, made it known that he had been “troubled by the pronouncement of the judgement”.

The Prime Minister had spoken by telephone with the RN leader on Wednesday. In 2024, he had already deemed the scenario of an immediate ineligibility penalty “disturbing”, whilst the current Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, had found it “shocking” before returning to government.

Evidently less “troubled” than François Bayrou, MoDem MP Erwan Balanant defended the court decision: “Democracy is not just about elections, it’s also about the rule of law”, he explained. “At what point in the polls do we decide we’re above the law?”, Prisca Thevenot, spokesperson for the Ensemble pour la République (EPR) group, pretended to wonder. “We are citizens like any others.”

The Horizons party remained silent, apart from former minister Christophe Béchu, who described Marine Le Pen’s conviction as “logical, because it punishes misappropriation of public funds in an organised system”, whilst lamenting that this risks “amplifying frustration among millions of French people”. Presidential candidate and former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe had not reacted by late Monday afternoon.

Within the ruling coalition, it was the right that made itself the loudest relay of these criticisms. Laurent Wauquiez, president of the Republican Right (DR) group in the National Assembly, expressed his negative opinion of a “heavy” and “exceptional” decision. “In a democracy, it is not healthy for an elected official to be barred from standing for election”, explained the Haute-Loire representative, who is running for the presidency of the Les Républicains (LR) party.

Constrained by his status as Interior Minister, his competitor Bruno Retailleau has – for now – refrained from reacting, in unison with his government colleagues. His entourage does not rule out that he may eventually do so, after a trip to London where he is due to attend a summit on combating illegal immigration on Monday and Tuesday.

The stakes are not small within LR, where they hope to convince the faction of the historical right-wing electorate seduced by Marine Le Pen, with a view to the next presidential election. Close to Bruno Retailleau, MEP François-Xavier Bellamy spoke of a “very dark day for French democracy”, which “will leave deep traces”.

Like many others in his camp, the former LR lead candidate in the European elections draws a parallel between Marine Le Pen’s conviction and that of François Fillon, implicated during the 2017 presidential election, then definitively convicted, also for misappropriation of public funds.

“They pulled this trick with François Fillon, they’re serving it up again with Marine Le Pen”, wrote Guilhem Carayon, vice-president of the Union of Rights for the Republic (UDR), Éric Ciotti’s party, on the social network X. “Don’t give up, your weapon is your ballot paper.”

LFI isolated on the left

More unexpectedly, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is also implicated since the opening of a judicial investigation in 2018 for breaches and irregularities when he was a Left Party MEP, joined the chorus of critics of the judgement. Merely relaying the statement written by his movement which “notes” the conviction but reiterates that it refuses “as a matter of principle” provisional execution in matters of ineligibility, the far-left leader added that “the decision to remove an elected official should rest with the people”.

Enough to raise eyebrows on the left, especially as the La France Insoumise (LFI) leadership specifies in its statement that “La France Insoumise has never used a court as a means of action to get rid of the National Rally”, in a formula suggesting that some – the justice system? the government? – would be inclined to instrumentalise the court’s decision to prevent the RN from accessing power.

A position in the form of a variation on the “lawfare” theory that Jean-Luc Mélenchon had developed at the time of his trial for rebellion that had followed the searches that had affected his organisation a year earlier.

When questioned in the National Assembly, LFI MP Éric Coquerel stuck to a position of “principle”: “We take note of the decision, but we think appeals should be exhausted. In any case, we’re not counting on the justice system to defeat the RN”, declared the chairman of the Finance Committee at the Bourbon Palace, while emphasising that he was not questioning the judges’ decision.

Several LFI MPs refrained from relaying the line promoted by the movement’s leadership, like Rodrigo Arenas, Loïc Prud’homme, Aly Diouara or Raphaël Arnault (see our Black Box), who did not retweet the statement.

In the rest of the left, the tone was noticeably different. MP from the Ecologists group Clémentine Autain (ex-LFI) described the justice system’s decision as “healthy”, and stressed that “if the Macronists, among others, had not themselves undermined our rule of law, we would not be questioning the independence of the judiciary in this decision”.

“The French are fed up with elected officials who misappropriate money!” reacted her colleague François Ruffin, repeating the words that Marine Le Pen uttered in 2004 regarding the fictitious jobs scandal in the city of Paris. The Somme MP also recalled that cases also affected Nicolas Sarkozy, Alexis Kohler and “26 ministers”: a “caste that serves itself more than it serves”.

“Guardian of the law”

Cyrielle Chatelain, president of the Green group in the Assembly, saw in the conviction of the RN leader “proof of a judicial system that works [...], whether you are powerful or weak”. The same tone came from Marine Tondelier, national secretary of the party, who considered that “[the] questioning [of justice] by politicians who claim to have the highest responsibilities is extremely serious and says a lot about how little they care about the rule of law”.

In the French Communist Party (PCF), Fabien Roussel, himself suspected of having held a fictitious job, welcomed “this judgement [which] must be considered for what it is: a reminder of equality before the law and the necessary probity of representatives”.

In a Socialist Party (PS) in the midst of a congress, it took several hours and internal consultations for a joint communiqué to finally be published. A text of only three paragraphs, which sticks to the bare minimum: “The Socialist Party takes note of this decision as it would have done for any other. It calls on everyone to respect the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law”, the party writes.

A few hours earlier, Socialist MP Emmanuel Grégoire had stressed that “those who believe they can claim, in inverted commas, an anointing from opinion polls to exempt themselves from respecting the law are mistaken” and considered that “the denunciation of the politicisation of justice [was] the argument of delinquents”. “We cannot ask judges to submit to the vox populi”, echoed PS First Secretary Olivier Faure on Monday morning on France 2.

In the early evening, on BFMTV, François Hollande reminded that Marine Le Pen could still appeal, including against her conviction to ineligibility, and sent a few barbs at the Prime Minister: “François Bayrou has no reason to be ’troubled’, [as Prime Minister] he is the guardian of the law”, he lashed out, judging that in the current circumstances, he was not in favour of a censure or dissolution of the National Assembly.

Pauline Graulle and Ilyes Ramdani

Black Box

Contrary to what was indicated in the article, Aurélie Trouvé did retweet La France Insoumise’s press release.