Le Pen Ban: Stopping the Far Right — or Fueling It? Yanis Varoufakis, Glenn Greenwald & David Broder

Hello, hello, hello and welcome.

I'm Mehran Khalili, we are DiEM25, a radical

political movement for Europe, and this is another

live discussion featuring subversive ideas you won't hear

anywhere else.

And tonight we're looking at the conviction of

Marine Le Pen, France's far right leader.

Last week a Paris court found her guilty

of misusing EU funds and banned her from

running in the next presidential election.

The thing is, Le Pen is a top

contender for the French presidency, arguably the front

runner, and this ruling has sent shockwaves around

Europe and beyond.

Because we're now in an era where the

legal system is increasingly used across the world

by political establishments to block their opponents and

silence dissent, a tactic known as lawfare.

So, was the Le Pen verdict justice served,

or are we watching courts replace voters?

What are the implications and dynamics of lawfare?

Does barring candidates actually weaken extremism, or does

it strengthen it?

And, of course, what can we as active,

engaged citizens do about all of this?

Well, we have a wonderful panel for you

tonight.

We have, of course, our own Yanis Varoufakis,

and we've also got the host of System

Update on Rumble, the Pulitzer Prize winning Glenn

Greenwald, and we have the Europe editor of

the esteemed Jacobin magazine, David Broder, with us

today.

And, of course, we have you, you out

there.

If you've got thoughts, comments, rants, ideas about

lawfare, questions you always wanted to put to

a panel like this, then please put them

in the YouTube chat and we will put

them to a panel.

Please hit the bell icon if you would

like to stay informed of whatever other YouTube

videos we put out.

And let's kick it off with Yanis.

Yanis, you've said that this case represents the

descent into authoritarianism of the political establishment.

You've called the ruling mind-boggling.

Can you elaborate on this view?

Yanis, unfortunately, is having some technical problems, so

Yanis will be rejoining us a little, but

perhaps I can ask you, Glenn, to step

in while Yanis reboots his computer.

Let's start again.

Sure.

I'm always happy to step in for Yanis.

So if this were an isolated case, if,

say, Marine Le Pen were charged with crimes

under French law, got convicted, were banned from

the ballot, I'm sure there would be suspicions,

and I think it's warranted every time to

have suspicions about lawfare whenever a person who's

leading in the polls or a very viable

candidate to win a presidential race suddenly is

banned from running because of a criminal conviction.

I think those suspicions are always going to

be warranted.

But I think, by and large, the discussion

would be about the intricacies of French law,

whether this is customary in French law or

not.

You have to talk about the idiosyncrasies of

French law.

To me, it seems like a pretty penny

-ante case.

I mean, I haven't followed it.

I'm not a French lawyer.

I haven't followed it every day, but there

was no self-enrichment on the part of

Marine Le Pen.

Everybody admits that.

It was really a case of kind of

taking a EU salary and using it primarily

to supplement the activists in her party rather

than people actually working as EU legislators.

So I don't know.

It seems a very borderline case.

But if it were just this, you would

say, well, look, maybe under French law, this

is taken very seriously.

Under EU law, the problem is it's anything

but isolated.

We're seeing this clear trend where we've seen

lawfare for a long time, not just against

the populist right, but many times against left

-wing candidates as well.

I have a lot of examples of those.

But in the last decade, it's primarily been

used against populist-right candidates.

The minute they start becoming too popular or

likely to win an election, they are not

only—charges are not only wrought against them, but

those charges are weaponised to ban them from

running, even though tens of millions of people,

maybe a majority of the country, want to

actually see them as president.

Here in Brazil, where I live, I have

lived for quite a while, Jair Bolsonaro, who

was elected in 2018, almost got reelected in

2022 when he lost to Lula, is at

least tied with, if not a little bit

ahead of Lula in current polls for 2026.

Can't run, even though at least half the

country wants him to be president.

Obviously, in the US, we saw that with

Donald Trump meeting into the 2024 election.

The explicit goal of Democrats was to imprison

him.

They did actually succeed in kicking him off

a ballot.

We've recently seen it in Romania with Colin

Drodescu after he won and they invalidated the

election, now have banned him.

And now we're seeing it with Marine Le

Pen, and there's other examples as well.

So at some point, you know, the only

way a justice system can really have efficacy

is if the public perceives it as apolitical,

as legitimate.

And I think we're on the precipice, if

not well past it, where even lots of

people who don't like those candidates, I don't

think Yanis is a fan of Marine Le

Pen, I'm certainly not, start to really believe

and suspect that the people who claim that

they're saving democracy are actually the ones engaged

in the most anti-democratic weapons to ensure

they control and win elections.

Thank you, Glenn.

Yanis, you're back now.

Would you concur with what you've heard from

Glenn?

Of course.

Well, it's a great honour and great joy

to be on this panel, on the DiEM25

panel, with Glenn and David, our past has

been crisscrossing for so long.

Look, allow me just to say a few

things because I've been losing a lot of

sleep over what's going on in Europe and

beyond.

Our conversation is not about Le Pen.

It's not about any particular politician.

I think it's more to do with what

a principled position must be for a decent

democratic left 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, amongst us

especially.

Just look at the distortions of the American

political system caused by the loss of political

rights of ex-convicts.

A huge proportion of Americans work in class,

especially with black Americans.

We know, Glenn just mentioned that, what happened

to Lula, before that Rafael Correa in Latin

America.

Catastrophic effects for their people.

And we have seen how the pathetic legal

efforts of the democratic establishment in the United

States to prevent Trump from running made the

terrible thing grow impossibly awful.

But looking at the Le Pen case in

some detail, I think there are three questions

that are quite separate that we need to

address.

The first one is, and I think Glenn

asked me indirectly, what do I want?

What do we want to see happen to

Le Pen?

The obvious answer is, Glenn and David, we

want to see Le Pen and her mates

get crushed at the ballot box in the

polling stations.

We want the masses to turn away from

her and from all her authoritarian xenophobic friends.

We want fascists like Le Pen, Trump, Musk,

or Ban to lose the discursive battle.

We want them to lose politically.

We want them to lose ethically.

We want to see them fall from grace

in the eyes of all decent people, not

just us leftists.

And we should be enjoying the sight of

her hypocrisy in action, because you see how

she protests.

She compares herself to Martin Luther King.

The judges have delivered a verdict that includes

her, instead of going to prison immediately, wearing

an ankle bracelet for two years.

And why is this hypocritical of her?

Because if she were president, if her party

had won in France, then their authoritarian policy,

heavy law and order policy, is against ankle

bracelets and in favour of incarcerating everyone at

the drop of a hat.

So allow me to rephrase this question.

Does banning her from participating in the next

presidential election help do any of this?

I think quite the opposite.

As Glenn said, look at Bolsonaro.

He was buoyed by lawfare.

The ban turns a fascist like Le Pen

into a pseudo hero.

But of course, on its own, the fact

that Le Pen and her mates, the global

nationalist international, may benefit from lawfare, from being

charged and banned and all that, that on

its own is not a reason to dispute

the ban.

Not on its own.

So I come to the second question.

Was Le Pen guilty of the charges?

Did she properly funnel resources from the European

Parliament to her national headquarters?

Here I can speak to some authority, I

believe.

I have no doubt that she did, that

she is guilty.

But let me place this in context.

Let me tell you, because I happen to

know how this system works from within, what

happened?

Members of the European Parliament are given dazzling

sums of money to employ staff, plus additional

budgets to fund political work in their own

home country.

And let me be precise.

If you're an MEP, you are allowed to

get a staff allowance of exactly €30,769,

almost €31,000, monthly.

Which is more than enough to hire a

PA, a researcher, a local constituency worker, and

still have many thousands left over.

And what happens is the leftover of her

money is routinely sent to the national parties,

whose funding from their national parliament is always

tighter than Brussels.

So cash-strapped party leaders, from the left,

the right, the centre, almost always oblige their

MEPs to send that money to the national

party.

So yes, Le Pen is probably guilty.

Well, let me just add that.

And in some cases, of course, it is

true that some of the leftovers find their

way in the pockets of relatives of the

MEPs.

I was just reminded of that, because I

remember a brutish member of the European Parliament

once boasting in my presence that it was

common in Brussels to employ one's husband or

wife while sleeping with one's staff.

So she was definitely guilty.

But of a crime which is so widespread

in the European Parliament that singling her out,

and only when she's leading the opinion polls,

and there is a serious chance of her

being, you know, declared the winner, the President

of the French Republic, that smacks of selective

justice.

And selective justice is not something that a

genuine Democrat can ever defend.

But for argument's sake, let's agree that even

if it is selective justice, that it must

be done.

What could the judge do?

You know, they present him, her with a

case, which is an open shut one.

They have no choice but to deliver a

guilty verdict.

Okay, let's assume.

Then there are two further issues, however, to

consider.

One concerns the indefensible use of the so

called provisional execution clause.

In other words, Le Pen was banned from

the election before her appeals were heard and

exhausted.

Well, that's how they stopped Lula da Silva

in Brazil from running so that the fascist

Bolsonaro could win.

And then when Lula's appeal was heard, and

the charges were dismissed, it was too late

to stop Bolsonaro from becoming president.

Does the left really want to say that

the use of provisional execution is bad when

used against our people, but quite all right

when they are used against somebody like Le

Pen?

That, I think, would be an incredible own

goal for the left.

I come to the second issue.

Should a conviction for any crime, any crime,

mean the loss of political rights, of the

right to stand in elections?

Allow me to be very categorical on that.

I say no.

Political rights should never, under any circumstances, be

suspended.

And I think this is imperative.

It is a principle worth fighting for.

Now, who can forget those of us who

are old enough to remember those anguishing days

and Bobby Sands, the convicted IRA man, ran

for parliament and won a seat in the

House of Commons from the May's high security

prison in Northern Ireland.

Now, even Trump, had he been sent to

jail by that New York judge, would still

be able to run for president.

And I think this is right and proper

and something that we Europeans must fight as

a right for everyone.

Which leads me to the last and third,

to the last question.

Should politicians be exempt from criminal charges just

because they are running high in the polls?

No, of course we should not, and I

put myself in it too as a They

should have thrown her in jail, no bracelets,

you know, what she wanted, what she's proposing

as part of her awful law and order

policy, but not ban her from running in

the elections.

Letting her out of jail but banning her

from the elections is a political gift to

the enemies of democracy, who can then claim

as they do, as Le Pen does, and

with some legitimacy, that democracy is to Shan.

Now, somebody can say, well, Yanis, what if

a convicted murderer gets elected?

Should he be allowed to run from prison?

Of course they should.

And if they win, despite their conviction, and

they are elected by voters who know that

they've been convicted, then we all have ended

up with a delicious constitutional crisis that we

deserve.

And I don't believe that it should be

up to a judge to resolve that.

It should be up to our politic to

do it.

Because 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 the democracy

we have.

I don't believe that any 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 naive as to believe in

an independent central bank.

Believe me, there is no such thing.

Some people understandably say to me that they

are worried with the ease with which the

panicking radical centre bans an ultra-right opponent

they think may beat them at the polls.

They're right.

Many progressives fear that the same courts and

the same means will be used tomorrow to

ban us.

They will.

In 2015, lest we forget, they shut down

our banks to ban us, those of us

who have been elected, had been elected, from

running the country.

And you know, if that had not worked,

they would have banned us from running for

office.

There's no doubt in my mind.

Indeed, let me share this with you, if

you don't know it.

A band of rightist lawyers tabled charges against

me at Greece's parliament for high treason.

What was the high treason, the charge?

The allegation that I undermined the national currency.

And which was the national currency?

The euro.

Okay, there's a common element to this.

But the justice that we, the left, have

a duty to fear that what we're doing

to Le Pen today, they will most definitely

do to us tomorrow, if we rise up

sufficiently in the polls.

But that is not the principal reason why

I oppose Le Pen's ban and why I

think the left should oppose it.

Or the ban of that clown Gheorghescu that

Glenn mentioned in Romania.

We should oppose these bans because no one's

political rights should ever be rescindable for any

reason.

As I said before, anywhere ever.

Having the guts to say that, especially in

defence of the political rights of an abominable

person like Le Pen, we should, you know,

a politician that we should want to crash

at the polling stations, that is the moral

clarifier.

This is the litmus test, the litmus test

for every radical Democrat.

If the left is to be worth its

salt.

Thank you, Yanis.

I'm glad we got most of the audio

there because you're having some internet trouble.

But thank you very much for that analysis.

David, if I can bring you in here.

I mean, Yanis, there's a lot to unpack

there in what Yanis said.

And Glenn, I would also like your reaction

after.

But if we can just linger a little

bit on the Le Pen case for the

moment, since that was the issue at hand.

You just arrived back from Paris, where you

were attending the rally, where Le Pen was

defiantly talking about her reaction to the ruling.

Tell me, what is the reaction?

Where do things move forward in France from

here?

And what has the reaction been also from

across the political spectrum?

Well, I should specify first that I was,

of course, reporting on the rally.

The message sent by Le Pen is that

this isn't a judicial decision, it's a political

decision.

And I think it relates to something that

Yanis said, which I agree with very much,

which is about the nature of the crime

itself.

It's easy for her to say, well, I'm

in politics, I'm committed to politics, I want

to defend my base and my values.

To that end, I hired people to work

for our political cause.

People who sympathise with Le Pen are not

going to react in shock horror that this

is some appalling abuse of public funds.

I'm on the left, I'm a socialist.

There is a long tradition of left-wing

parties treating their parliamentarians as servants of their

party and not that of the parliament.

The idea of a workers' representative on a

workers' wage, giving the rest of their income

to their party.

Members of the European Parliament are not elected

technocrats or elected administrators, they're political figures.

So we should be honest that the kind

of practises that Le Pen was engaged in

are rife across the political spectrum.

Voters may consider them to be unjust, they

are illegal, but I think that there's very

little chance that people are going to throw

their hands up in horror at this appalling

abuse of office, because very many people just

won't see it like that.

In Le Pen's case, there is a great

deal of hypocrisy.

Her party has long called for the so

-called moralisation of politics, saying it was the

only party with clean hands, in that drawing

on the language of the anti-corruption trials

in Italy in the early 1990s, which destroyed

the mass parties, but ironically enough helped pave

the way for Silvio Berlusconi.

The judges broke up the old mass parties

and opened the way for someone with power

outside of politics and with a media empire,

Silvio Berlusconi, to make his way in.

One of the main judges in the clean

hands trials, Antonio Di Pietro, later said, well,

the effect of the judge's actions, you know,

casting out all the corrupt politicians, was to

create a void into which Berlusconi could step,

and in fact into which right-wing populist

parties did step.

The action of judges taking candidates off the

ballot, the action of judges removing politicians, doesn't

empower voters.

It doesn't empower ordinary people.

If in the current moment we're living through,

the great crisis of democracy is that people

don't feel that they have power over the

decisions in their lives, they feel that decisions

have been taken by others elsewhere, they feel

that they're not able to affect political change,

then judges stepping in on their behalf isn't

going to empower people.

And that's why I think France Insoumise has

been quite right to argue the way we

beat Le Pen is at the ballot box,

as the left-wing parties did in last

summer's parliamentary elections.

Our response to the far-right is not

to try and get them cancelled or kicked

out or banned from running, but to mobilise

people for a better political alternative.

So Le Pen, people have been sharing a

lot in the last few days, this video

of her in 2013, calling for exactly the

kind of automatic ban, exactly the kind of

ban for life from running for election, for

people found guilty of abuse of office, for

deviating public funds and so on.

She has contributed to the political climate that

she is now denouncing, where judges can rule

people out of running for election.

So she's been hypocritical in that sense.

And my problem is why the call for

the moralisation of politics, this call for judges

to intervene, this call for people to be

banned from running, this anti-political call, which

presents the work of politicians and parliaments as

just a burden on the public funds.

My problem is why has this rhetorical posture,

long beloved of the far-right, now become

a cause célèbre of progressive liberals?

Why are they treating Le Pen using this

kind of argument?

So I think that if we look at

the likely effect on French politics, people have

rightly pointed out that politicians of other political

forces, other political sides, have also been subject

to this kind of ruling in recent years.

It's not that unique.

But I think it will be quite easy

for Le Pen's party to portray themselves as

the victims, to say, we're marching towards power,

now it's been struck down.

But of course, it's not going to stop

the force of ideas, the force of mobilisation

that their party has.

After all, even in last summer's election, Le

Pen wasn't on the ballot paper, and we

saw 37% of French people vote for

the national rally.

I think it's fanciful to believe that this

is going to be the thing that's going

to stop her party.

And to really defeat it, we can't rely

on judges, because they'll find another candidate, they'll

run anyway, they'll be defiant, their bases riled

up.

As you said, I went to the rally

on Sunday, it wasn't very impressive in terms

of its numbers or size.

But they have, I think, as Yanis Varoufakis

rightly says, they've got a propaganda victory from

this.

In fact, the banning of Le Pen from

running has changed this from a story about

her hypocrisy, and the abuse of public funds,

into a story about her being victimised.

So even as her party actually does become

more conformist with the European establishment on things

like Euro membership, on things like NATO, on

things like supporting Israel, even as the party

merges with the mainstream centre-right, it's able

to present itself as a victim, as something

that elites are trying to cancel.

And I think that's a powerful propaganda weapon

for them.

Thank you, David.

Glenn, can I bring you back in for

your reaction?

Yeah, sure.

So I just want to use a couple

of concrete examples, because as somebody who defends

free speech quite robustly, one of the arguments

I try and make for people on the

left, when they are open to the viability

of using censorship as a weapon, is I

say, if you endorse this framework, if you

construct this framework, it can very easily, and

it will be used against you in the

future.

That's the argument Yanis is making about this

weaponization of welfare and the like, and David

alluded to it as well.

And I just want to say, you don't

really have to imagine some future where that

could be used against the left.

In South America, it was repeatedly used against

the left.

And I think in a way that's very

illustrative of what I think is the most

important point here.

I mean, we talked a little bit about

Ecuador, where it was used against Rafael Correa.

I remember in 2019, when Yves Morales won

that election, and they concocted voter fraud against

him, drove him out of Bolivia under threats,

where he took exile in Mexico.

But Brazil is the example I know best,

because I've lived here.

I was very personally involved in a lot

of these events through my reporting.

PT, the Workers' Party, which is Lula da

Silva's, could not lose an election from 2002

to 2016.

His main opposition was this sort of centre

-right, very establishment party.

And they were just completely drained of vitality,

charisma.

They were just representing bankers.

Nobody was interested in them.

Lula was this spectacularly charismatic singular talent in

politics.

And he won in 2002 and 2006.

And then he chose as his handpicked successor,

the first woman president.

She was kind of an obscure bureaucrat, Dilma

Rousseff, who won in 2010 and then in

2014, vanquishing every time this centre-right faction.

And in 2016, when Dilma was into her

second term, they created this corruption scandal, because

Brazil's economy was suffering for a lot of

reasons.

Commodity prices were falling.

The 2008 financial crisis was still reverberating.

And they exploited that lack of popularity to

just invent this ridiculous corruption scandal, claiming that

she had used this very obscure budgetary tactic

called pedaladas, which in Portuguese means pedalling.

But it's sort of this rotating debt tactic

that is used all throughout the democratic world.

And in the context of corruption in Brazil,

it was like a tiny little speck.

But they manufactured it and they impeached her.

And so heading into 2018, her vice president

was very unpopular, assumed the vice presidency.

He was so hated by everybody.

There was no chance he could win.

Lula was intending to run again, continuing PT's

success.

And that was when they brought charges against

Lula, corruption charges by this anti-corruption task

force.

And they not only imprisoned him, but banned

him from running in 2018 at a time

that he was leading.

And the reason the establishment did that, I

promise, was not to pave the way for

Bolsonaro.

They hate Bolsonaro.

They hated Bolsonaro.

They thought they were finally going to get

this sort of centre-right pro-establishment, pro

-banking figure in.

But instead, by this point, you had delegitimised

the entire establishment.

And so anybody who represented the establishment, the

centre-left, the centre-right, had been discredited.

And that paved the way for Bolsonaro, who

won this resounding victory against Lula's Workers' Party

in 2018.

And then the only reason why they let

Lula out of prison, because the Supreme Court

had repeatedly affirmed his convictions, they used the

reporting I had done as a pretext.

But the real reason they did was because

they were desperate to get rid of Bolsonaro.

Only Lula in all of Brazil could defeat

Bolsonaro.

And so they let him out, restored his

eligibility to run.

He ran, and he barely won.

And now they're dealing with Bolsonaro's renewed popularity

by now declaring him ineligible.

And you can see that the people in

Brazil are starting to understand that the whole

justice system has been politicised and corrupted.

And it's driving anti-establishment anger and resentment

and rage even further.

It doesn't work.

It may work in the short term if

you ban the candidate who might win.

But all you're doing is feeding into the

establishment hatred that's giving rise to these right

-wing populists and extremists in the first place.

And this is what I think is the

most important point.

For me, what really happened was you had

2016 when you had the decision of the

British people to leave the EU because of

resentment that was directed toward Brussels, followed just

three or four months later by Donald Trump's

very shocking and for Western liberals traumatising victory

over the monarch of neoliberalism and the establishment

Hillary Clinton.

And that began this sense that Western liberals

could no longer trust the public to be

free.

They couldn't trust them to have free speech

on the internet because they were concerned that

it would lead to people making decisions outside

of their control.

And that turned into a refusal to trust

the population to vote freely.

And that was when you started seeing this

kind of systematic attempt to not just defeat

right-wing populists in the polls, not really

to even do that at all, but instead

to prosecute them, to unleash the law against

them, to ban them from the ballot, to

take away the choice from people in the

first place.

And the reason I find this so dangerous

beyond the principle that Yanis articulated, which I

completely share, that if you believe in democracy,

and remember, all this is being done by

people who are waving the banner of democracy.

We have to ban the Romanian candidate who

won the election because he's anti-democratic and

pro-Russia.

Marine Le Pen is anti-democratic.

Bolsonaro is anti-democratic.

Trump is a threat to democracy.

To save democracy, we have to ban them.

Beyond that principle that if you believe in

democracy, you should want the people to decide

who they want to be their leaders, which

is a principle I think is important, what

happens is the Western establishment, the Western neoliberal

establishment never had to look in the mirror

and say, why is there so much anti

-establishment rage and disgust so that now there's

a lane for right-wing populists posing as

opponents of establishment dogma?

What do we have to do to regain

the trust of people to abandon neoliberalism, maybe

to become left-wing populists?

They just didn't want to have to take

responsibility.

They didn't want to have to change.

They didn't want to have to abandon their

dogma.

The only alternative then if you're going to

stay hated, if you're going to cling to

an ideology that has destroyed people's lives is

to become anti-democratic, to ban the most

popular figures against you in order to ensure

that you continue to win elections.

The more they do that, again, there may

be some short-term gain.

I don't know if Marine Le Pen will

be banned through 2027.

It seems like she will be.

I don't know if Jordan Bordella or some

other right-wing populist in France has any

chance with the same kind of stature as

she does.

It might produce some short-term benefit, but

all it's really doing is feeding into this

perception that people already have of the status

quo perpetuators, the neoliberal order, that they are

corrupted, that they are the ones who are

trying to silence people's voices.

It's this elite, very far and distant, that

won't even deign to try and convince the

public that they should continue to vote for

their candidates because all they do instead is

just ban the other candidates.

Again, you could debate every one of these

cases individually, argue over the legal intricacies of

each, but the pattern is so clear.

I think they have to be very naive

to think, and this is the Le Pen

case, I think personified, that all the right

-wing populists who are rising in the polls,

who are leading the polls to win, suddenly

start committing crimes just in the nick of

time to justify their banishment from the ballot,

whereas all of the establishment candidates are just

incredibly clean and law-abiding and driven by

integrity.

That was what made Dilma's impeachment in Brazil

so hilarious is you had the biggest thieves

and crooks on the planet, people with tens

of millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts,

standing up on the floor of the Congress

saying, we can no longer tolerate Dilma Rousseff's

corruption, where, again, her corruption was very small,

bore.

The same thing with Marine Le Pen having

followed her case.

It's like, okay, I don't disbelieve that she's

guilty, but it does seem like a very

pedestrian kind of corruption that I'm sure politicians

across the spectrum engage in, but because there's

a benefit or a kind of anti-democratic

weapon sitting there to use against her, it's

just continuing to destroy faith and credibility of

these institutions and fuelling this cycle more and

more.

It is ultimately anti-democratic in the sense

that the people who have been in power

for so long can stay in power, not

by convincing people that they deserve it, not

by convincing people that their policies benefit their

lives in any material way, not by convincing

them that they are actually uncorrupted, but instead

just simply by eroding democracy.

There are some people who seem to see

that.

I think Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who I guess

you could say is the leader of the

French left, did seem to say, I think

elections should be decided by the ballot after

the Le Pen ineligibility, but typically when it

comes to power, the desire to win, the

desire to grab power from your political enemies

is so visceral, so intense that it's very

easy to abandon those principles, and I just

think it's going to make all these problems

more entrenched, not go away.

Thank you Glenn.

Yanis, I see you nodding there, and I

know that you have to leave us soon,

so let me bring you back in.

There's absolutely nothing I want to add to

that.

I agree absolutely entirely, and I do believe

that Jean-Luc Mélenchon has taken the right

line presently.

It's a difficult line to toe, because of

being squeezed by all sides, and not just

on this matter, on Palestine, on everything.

So, you know, all strength to France is

to miss, and I have absolutely nothing else

to add.

This is one of the few times I've

experienced that.

Okay, stunning, cool.

Just on that point with regard to that

you made there Glenn, the charge being small

potatoes, and also I think David also mentioned

it, this is kind of a common practise.

There's been a lot of reporting, including in

Le Monde, that between 2019 and 2022, one

in five MEPs were actually found to break

the rules in exactly this way, diverting funds

to their national parties, and they just had

to pay back the money.

The case never became public, so this certainly

would lend itself to potentially looking like lawfare,

something dubious.

Some quick comments from the chat before I

hand it to you, David.

Ahmed says, ban them now, they will play

the victim anyway.

Better play the victim than be in power.

Mauro says, Le Pen broke the law, she's

going to pay for it, just like I

would do if I stole someone else's money.

What you call lawfare is actually accountability, end

of story.

I've heard this repeated quite often.

And Alex Blue says, why should every voter

need to be an expert on the crime

and whether or not it was true?

Don't we have courts to look into this

and determine this for us?

David, as I bring you back in, I

want to ask you your take on this

idea that it actually empowers the far right

in this case.

You spoke about it a little bit before.

To what extent is that turning out to

be the case and what, if anything, can

be done to head that off?

I'll just reply to the comment by Alex

Blue you mentioned, which is no, of course,

every voter doesn't need to be an expert

on the crime and make a legal ruling.

The court is there for that.

The problem is the principle that people convicted

of crimes should or shouldn't be banned from

running for public office as a result.

It's perfectly fine for her to be convicted

and for then people to decide whether or

not they're going to vote for her anyway.

Where my problem comes in is the reliance

on the judicial authorities to pre-select candidates.

And in this case, it seems quite obvious

that even if she can't run, then her

party is going to run, perhaps Jordan Badella,

as candidate.

He will run his own campaign, but with

her always there by his side, shouting about

how she's been silenced.

Her name is going to be central to

the presidential election campaign, like it or not.

So we're two years out from when the

election will actually happen, and this has fired

the starting gun on it.

And what we're starting the campaign from is

the most popular candidate was banned from running.

I think that's very counterproductive.

I think that doesn't work.

I think that anyone should be able to

stand, even if they are convicted.

I must say, I'm not quite so convinced

that by the idea, I think I disagree

with you a little, Glenn, that this particular

decision can be seen purely as the intention

to take down the candidate from one political

side.

In fact, what I was saying before was

what my problem is, is that a call

that was previously raised by the far right,

i.e. let's ban people from public office,

from misuse of public funds, has now been

gleefully taken up across the mainstream politics.

In fact, Le Pen called for the automatic

ban before it was actually, I should say,

obligatory ban on convicts running for public office.

She called for it before it was introduced.

So it's boomeranged on her.

Other important political candidates have been subject to

this kind of judgement too.

For example, François Fillon, who was the main

centre-right candidate in 2017, had a quite

similar scandal which resulted in 2020 and him

being banned from public office.

And he's certainly a pro-business, pro-NATO,

whatever you like, candidate.

In fact, at the rally on Sunday, it

was quite funny when Eric Ciotti, who's like

a former Gaullist, a former centre-right politician,

who's now allied with Le Pen, he tried

to link the two cases and say, well,

we Gaullists, us centre-right, we were the

victims of the left-wing establishment too.

And then the crowd didn't cheer because they

want to be the only victims, they want

the far-right alone to appear as a

victim, which I think isn't quite true.

I think the question of principle of whether

people should be allowed to run and our

judgement on the severity of the crime, and

indeed separate from that, a political judgement on

whether this will backfire, is separate from a

judgement on Le Pen herself, a political judgement

on Le Pen herself.

I think she was very hypocritical.

I think she herself fed this judicial populism,

it's boomeranged against her.

But I think it's bad for democracy in

general, because the principle of judicial populism is

to take power out of the hands of

voters and parties and mobilisation, and to put

it in the hands of the courts.

The left has about a quarter to a

third of the French electorate behind it, it

can weigh seriously on the French electoral space,

it's not just neoliberal centrists versus the far

-right.

But if we're having a public debate, which

is between rival claims of corruption and warfare,

and about the politicisation of the justice system,

that also means we're not having argument about

social welfare, about distribution, about pensions, about the

record of Emmanuel Macron's government.

And I think that that's very damaging for

a democratic debate.

And I think it actually pitches all politics

in the direction of a kind of anti

-politics of thinking nothing comes from the public

sphere.

Just as a final point on Le Pen's

hypocrisy, I will note that even in recent

months, her party called for Rima Hassan, the

France Ansemis member of the European Parliament, to

be stripped of her French citizenship on alleged

apologia for Hamas.

The opinions imputed to her are of course

entirely, that's not at all what she said.

And of course, in France, we've also seen

the repression of pro-Palestine protests.

Didn't hear a word from Marine Le Pen

and the far right about that.

In Germany, where I normally live, we're having

people deported for attending Palestine protests without even

being convicted.

So I think what I find very troubling

is the increasing role of courts in delimiting

the legitimate political space, trying to strike people

down and ban them.

I think it's disempowering.

I think it's the opposite of the kind

of mobilisation, the kind of mass democracy on

which the left relies.

Thanks.

David Glenn, your reaction?

Yeah.

So I think that point about how, when

you're talking about the validity of court rulings

and electoral bodies rendering candidates ineligible, how that's

a distraction from what politics ought to be

focussing on, which are policies and whether that

they're helping the ordinary voters' lives or whether

they're harming them.

That is true.

But I also think that's the point.

You know, if you look at the elections

in the United States over the last decade,

Democrats have barely offered any kind of positive

agenda.

The agenda has been Donald Trump is corrupt,

Donald Trump is a fascist, Donald Trump is

a criminal, Donald Trump should be banned from

the ballot.

And I think a lot of Western neoliberals,

not the left, but Western neoliberals are far

more comfortable having the focus be on these

court issues and process issues precisely because they

don't really have an agenda that they offer.

The left does.

But as you said, the left is, you

know, even in France, a minority of voters,

the establishment that is driving these kind of

convictions do not want a focus on their

ideology, because how can they justify how neoliberalism

has done anything but gut the middle class,

you know, create downward mobility for the working

class all throughout the West?

So I think that's a feature and not

a bug of using this lawfare is exactly

that, that you don't even have to convince

the public any longer that the status quo

ideology is a good one.

I also want to say, you know, obviously,

lawfare is not in any way reserved for

populist right candidates.

I mean, I talked, in fact, about how

in South America, it's been long used, primarily

against left wing candidates.

But I think the best example of how

it can backfire is in the United States

with Donald Trump.

When Trump was president, they impeached him twice,

twice, the first president in history to very

few have been impeached at all, he was

impeached twice.

And then when he was out of office

and running again, and obviously a threat to

win, they indicted him four separate times in

four different jurisdictions, two federal, two state, all

on felony charges.

And they were open about the fact, Democrats

were, that their strategy for 2024 was to

convict him of as many crimes as possible

and even force him into prison, because they

thought that would help them win.

And on top of the censorship that they

use, banning him from Max, banning him from

Facebook.

And voters saw this, voters saw the criminal

convictions in Manhattan, they saw the prosecutions for

having classified documents that is at Mar-a

-Lago of being accused of having trying to

overturn the election.

And it wasn't just that people weren't bothered,

they perceived it as an abuse of the

political system.

That's how he depicted it continuously.

And ultimately, because people hate establishment institutions and

distrust them so much, it played into their

anti-establishment fervour, and it strengthened Trump even

more.

I mean, he won more solidly in this

last election than he did in 2016.

And I think that is the big risk

with using this.

And the last thing I want to say

is, about some of the comments that you

read, I of course understand why some people

on the left are eager to banish Marine

Le Pen, however you can do it.

I don't care, put her in prison, convict

her, ban her from the ballot.

I don't really care.

Just as long as she's gone, I'm happy.

The problem with that is that even if

you don't care about the principle, it surprises

me sometimes to hear people on the left

say, oh, we trust the courts, let the

courts handle it, we trust these institutions, they'll

do the right thing.

Because for so long, these institutions throughout Europe,

in the United States, throughout South America and

elsewhere, have been programmed in exactly this way

against the left.

I watched in 2022 when the CIA, that

openly was rooting for Lula to be Bolsonaro

because now these intelligence agencies regard right-wing

populism as a much greater threat, not than

hard leftism, but a sort of soft leftism

that Lula represents, kind of centre-left establishment

leftism that they can live with.

30 years ago, the CIA would have been

engineering a coup in Brazil against someone like

Lula.

In 2022, they went to Brazil and basically

threatened Bolsonaro about talking about voter fraud, the

integrity of the ballot box, warned him that

there'd be severe consequences for Brazil.

A lot of people on the left said,

oh, thank you, CIA, thank you to the

United States government.

That's what worries me the most is that

if you start endorsing these kind of frameworks

where just openly candidates who are leading in

the polls are being declared ineligible, and you

don't care if Marine Le Pen was singled

out.

You don't care if a bunch of people

in the centre and even the centre-left

did the same thing she does.

You don't care if only she were prosecuted

for political reasons.

You're giving that kind of credibility and power,

not just to this framework, but to these

institutions that carry them out that basically guarantee

that that's going to be used against you.

I think this censorship stuff is the perfect

issue.

The left was cheering all the censorship against

the right over the last decade.

Now we see the Trump administration and countries

in Europe like Germany criminalising protests against Israel,

criminalising pro-Palestinian protests, deporting people for the

crime of criticising the Israeli destruction of Gaza.

It's very hard if you've been someone cheering

the silencing of your political opponents through censorship

over the last decade to rise up and

wave the banner of free speech with any

credibility in order to defend that.

It does require a principle defence, even when

it's being used against your political opponents, as

hard as that is if you want to

be effective when raising these values.

Thank you, Glenn.

I should add that while we're talking here

about banning people who are on the cusp

of political power, lawfare can also be used

against activists, against movements.

Individual activists, obviously Edward Snowden, as we all

know too well, Julian Assange, etc.

It's the same story.

So yes, it can definitely be coming for

you sometime soon.

A lot of our audience are activists and

active citizens.

I want to linger a little though on

that point that you just made, Glenn, which

is that the fact that it backfires and

makes, you know, if you outlaw something, it

makes it more attractive.

For me, that seems just totally obvious.

If anyone that understands human nature would understand

that.

And yet, as you say, since 2016, the

establishment doesn't seem to get it.

So as I hand it over to you,

David, I want to understand, like, why do

they keep getting this so wrong?

Well, I think that there's an exaggerated belief

in the centre-left political establishment that this

kind of accusation, or even this kind of

conviction, is indeed damning.

That people are indeed great believers in the

established institutions, in republican propriety, in the highfalutin

values proclaimed by the French state.

I think it's not an accident that they

think like that, because a lot of people

who are close to political power, institutional power,

probably do have those values themselves and think

like that.

But we have a great deal of examples

to show that it doesn't work.

I'm a historian of Italy.

In Italy, throughout the 1990s, 2000s, early 2010s,

the main centre-left force moved away from

being a party that sought the votes of

working-class people for social democratic reforms to

being a party that was against Berlusconi, and

that thought that showing how evil and awful

he was, was the way to build an

electoral coalition.

So they brought together bits of the centre

-right and lots of the centre-left.

It's a bit like in the US case,

the strategy of the Lincoln Project.

Let's appeal to honest right-wingers, honest republicans

who don't like Trump, and that's how we'll

create a social base to get rid of

him.

And what we see is that that kind

of politics that's all about just, oh, keeping

the wolf from the door, getting rid of

the awful, evil, corrupt sinner, that isn't going

to mobilise masses of people to vote when

what they're worried about is their own living

standards, their own lives, their own careers, their

own housing.

So this kind of anti-corruption politics can

serve as a kind of elite ideology to

span the centre-left, centre-right divide.

I'm very unconvinced that it's able to mobilise

majorities.

In the Italian case, what eventually happened was

when, at the depth of the Eurozone crisis,

the Italian president Giorgio Napolitano wanted to create

a national unity government, the Democrats, the very

people who pivoted the whole strategy on being

anti-Berlusconi for 20 years, made a grand

coalition government with him.

They entered office together, firstly in supporting a

technocrat cabinet, and then as an explicit alliance

of their parties.

Berlusconi was then banned from running for public

office in 2013 on fraud charges.

And what did we get instead?

Well, we got Matteo Salvini taking over the

Italian right instead, and now Giorgio Melani.

So you can get rid of the individual,

you can convict the crook, but what you

can't do is destroy their ideas or their

social base or the things they're voting for.

People vote for the Rassemblement Nationale because they

want less immigrants and less taxes.

Those are the fundamental pivots of their support.

They're going to vote for that anyway in

2027, even if Marine Le Pen isn't on

the ballot paper.

To contradict, to push back against those ideas

and values requires mobilising people who don't think

like that, and also eating into the far

right's own base.

I think the striking down of Marine Le

Pen is very unlikely to help us progress

in that direction.

Thank you, David.

As we sort of close out this session,

I'd like to look, as I mentioned, our

audience are largely activists.

So what could, Glenn, if I can ask

you, is there anything that the left can

do to sort of neutralise against this proactively?

Is there anything, as we go about our

business, that we can do to, well, not

prevent this necessarily happening to us, but if

it does, to mitigate the impact?

And what are those things?

Yeah, that's, I think, an important question.

I began my journalism career working with and,

I guess, aligning with dissidents, anti-establishment dissidents,

Julian Assange first, but I've always had a

strong association and connection to pro-Palestinian protesters,

other kind of protest movements, obviously Edward Snowden.

And so anything that legitimises the state creating

frameworks to punish dissent, any kind of dissent

from establishment dogma on the left or the

right, I just repel from instinctively, because even

if it's being used one day against your

political enemies, there's no doubt the next day

it will be used against your allies.

And we've seen that so many times.

And I think the most important thing, look,

I'm human, I understand the temptation to punish

your political opponents.

You know, when there's a politician I really

hate and I see that they're being prosecuted

or accused, you know, part of me gets

happy because I think the world would be

a better place if they don't have power.

The problem is, that's like an immediate kind

of primal instinct that doesn't have a lot

of thought and reason behind it.

And even if you are comfortable with that

kind of, you know, reasoning, like, yeah, I

don't care if it's legitimate or not, just

Marine Le Pen, ban from the ballot is

an automatically good thing.

Even if that pragmatic rather than, I guess,

ethical framework is what's driving you, it still

is incumbent on you from a pragmatic perspective

to think about what the consequences of that

might be beyond just the immediate benefit.

And, you know, I see the right right

now that had been pretending to be free

speech advocates for the last 10 years because

it was primarily censorship was directed against them,

you know, turning around and being very aggressively

defending Trump's multiple attacks on dissent.

But this time it's more coming from the

left against Israel and those sorts of things.

And, you know, I think they're doing themselves

a huge disservice because the next time there's

censorship against them and they stand up to

wave their free speech banner, everyone's going to

laugh in their face, deservedly so.

And I think the challenge of any left

wing project is not just to quest for

power in the most immediate way, regardless of

the means, because that's what every political faction

does.

But it's to stand for some kind of

principle that applies universally.

And I think that's not just about rising

above and unilaterally disarming.

I think it makes a political movement much

more effective and powerful and appealing over the

long term.

I think that's why the establishment has lost

so much credibility and faith throughout the democratic

world, because they stand for nothing other than

the perpetuation of their own power.

And that's not just amoral to me, but

it's highly self-defeating as well.

Thank you, Glenn.

So the left needs to win the battle

of ideas, basically, and not the battle of

whose judges do what.

David, if I can bring you in for

a final comment.

Well, my final comment is to agree with

Glenn's final point and hopefully to wrap together

what I said earlier.

The point of left wing politics is not

just to give people nice things or to

keep the far right from power.

The point of left wing politics is to

empower people, to give them more of a

democratic say, to have more decisions over their

own lives, to take part in running public

life.

Even if the judges were responding to laws,

that the ban on office thing is something

that comes from legislation, in fact, dating back

to 1992 and then extended a few years

ago.

Even if the judges are applying the law

as written, controversial as that is, I think

it's a bad thing for them to be

striking people off the ballot paper.

I think it doesn't empower democracy.

It doesn't empower voters to take the decision

to their own hands.

As Yanis said earlier, I very much want

to see Marine Le Pen defeated by people

turning out, not just against her, but turning

out to vote for something better, to turn

out for a more generous, more solidaristic society,

one that tackles problems like climate change, one

that does things like stop support for Israel,

one that doesn't plan the economic future on

re-militarisation.

I want the French election campaign to be

about all those things.

Now I'm very worried that it won't be

and that we're going to spend the next

two years talking about how Marine Le Pen

has been cancelled.

I think that's a great shame.

Okay, good point.

Thank you.

As we close out, I just want to

thank our panel and thank you out there

for all your comments and for watching us.

And if you would like to join DiEM25,

go to diem25.org slash join.

If you'd like to donate to DiEM25 slash

donate.

Don't forget to catch Glenn on System Update

on Rumble and read David in Jacobin and

elsewhere.

And we will see you at the same

time, same place, two weeks from now.

Take care.