In a week of high political drama, far-right leader Marine Le Pen and her allies condemned the sentence she received last Monday for embezzling public funds as the culmination of a judicial witch hunt. Her protégé and National Rally President Jordan Bardella decried a “tyranny of judges.” Justices have since received death threats, and at least one judge is under police protection.

Prosecution framed as Persecution

Far from acknowledging that the hard-right’s vitriolic rhetoric was producing potentially deadly consequences, Le Pen doubled down in a rally on Sunday, repeating claims that her conviction and sentencing were borne not of judicial decisions but political ones.

For illegally diverting European Parliament funds to the party, Le Pen was sentenced to four years in prison, two of which were suspended, and two years will be served outside of jail with an electronic bracelet.

But it was her five-year ban from running for political office that has infuriated the right and far-right in France, despite being a sentence well established in French law. Indeed, police, prosecutors, and judges spent more than nine years investigating the case, in which some two-dozen members of National Rally took part in a scheme where assistants’ jobs were invented to claim millions of euros from the European Parliament.

The far-right party’s attempt to spin the scandal as a kind of persecution run by a “cabal of judges” has so alarmed politicians across the political spectrum that they railed against the three-time presidential candidate in rival rallies in and around the capital.

Rival Parties try to Shift the Narrative 

Just a few miles from the far-right rally, trade unions, the Greens, and the left-wing party France Unbowed gathered in Place de la République to accuse Le Pen and her party of being neo-fascists who considered themselves above the law. “Their conspiracy theories threaten justice and the rule of law,” said Green Party leader Marine Tondelier. “Yet we’ve been following Marine Le Pen’s narrative questioning the sentence, rather than discussing the reason for her conviction!”

The governing Renaissance party met in Saint Denis to denounce “right and left extremes,” and Prime Minister François Bayrou said his party was willing to work with anyone “who respects the rule of law,” a (not so) subtle dig at Marine Le Pen.

The National Rally leader is hardly the only politician to have run afoul of the law. In fact, so many French politicians have been mired in scandal that an indignant up-and-coming presidential candidate said in 2013 that any politician convicted of financial improprieties should be banned from running for political office – for life.

Her name? Marine Le Pen.

She is nevertheless appealing her sentence in the hope of running in the 2027 presidential election, for which she is the clear frontrunner.

I filed the report below for CBC Radio on April 6, after attending all three rallies, where each camp claimed to be defending democracy…some more convincingly than others.