LEFT and right were rallying in Paris yesterday. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) gathered to protest against the judicial decision to ban Le Pen from contesting the presidential 2027 elections in France following her conviction for embezzlement last week.
The conviction arose from what is a quite routine form of financial jiggery pokery that is almost the norm for the European Parliament where influence-peddling, corporate connivance with legislators and straightforward political bribery are business as usual for this most bourgeois of parliaments.
Le Pen was accused of staffing her party’s operation in the European Parliament and the constituencies with people whose nominal role in servicing the party’s MEPs was a cover for their real responsibilities as party functionaries.
She told the crowd at her rally that the legal case against her was a politically motivated witch-hunt and invoked the example of Martin Luther King Jr’s many travails with the US justice system.
This comparison has some force precisely because millions see the judgement as the work of a French Establishment that is in a deep crisis of its own making with the possibility of a political consensus around the neoliberal model now vanishingly small.
But to the actual facts of the case. Anyone who believes that this practice is confined to Eurosceptic parties, as Le Pen herself might have remarked, is too gullible to be involved in politics at the level of the Brussels talking shop.
The (more-or-less) united left also rallied to mark out their position on the controversy in which many people, of both right and left, and the centre see the decision as an attempt to throw the presidential election off course by removing from contention the leader of a party that, for all its contradictions and deficiencies, has the electoral support of, if not a majority of working people in France, a very substantial minority.
Rassemblement Nationale, in a distorted way, reflects the very real criticism millions of French people have about the country’s political system and, hitherto, the European Union.
Paradoxically, Le Pen’s party has been backtracking on its largely rhetorical criticism of the EU as it seeks to win the support of at least a more substantial element in the French ruling class.
RN president Jordan Bardella was among the speakers at the demonstration. He is the person most likely to benefit from Le Pen being in the penalty box, and while describing Le Pen’s conviction as a “dark day” for France undoubtedly sees something of an opportunity for his own career.
It was Bardella who signified the party leadership’s acceptance of the EU austerity regime and the kind of fiscal rectitude that is built into the EU’s treaty obligation that member states are obliged to follow.
In this slow-motion turn from opposition to the EU’s doings to the mostly common strategy of the variously disunited European ruling classes, Bardella was signalling to the French bourgeoisie and the EU elite that his party is now fit for government.
This strategic turn is replicated throughout Europe. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s “post-fascist” premier, quite quickly gave into the EU orthodoxy so effectively policed by one of her predecessors, Mario Draghi, variously prime minister of coalition governments in Italy and head of the European Central Bank.
The European far right, like our own home-grown Reform UK, presents a highly ambiguous face to the various electorates but when it comes to challenging big business, the banks or the corporate power vested in the institutions of the EU they talk the talk less and less and walk the walk never.
