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

[Mehran] 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 the 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.

[Glen] 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.