IN THE latest display of ‘Our Democracy’, Marine Le Pen has been given a four-year jail sentence – half of it suspended and half to be served with an electronic tag – and banned from standing for election for five years.
Le Pen is the most popular political candidate in France. Most polls indicate that she was 12 points clear of her nearest rival. Mike Benz, the anti-censorship campaigner, data analyst and national security expert, shared the following poll figures:
Similarly the following poll figures/election predictions circulated widely on news of the sentence:
National Rally (Rassemblement National or RN) have of course been doing very well for years, so much so that only a kind of system fix has prevented them from forming a French government or having their party leader as French President. RN poll above the levels by which Keir Starmer became UK Prime Minister for example. But the French political and media establishment has been determined to keep RN out (does that sound familiar?) So far, they have managed to do so by exploiting the French system where presidential voting occurs in multiple rounds. When RN win the first round, as happened in the last Presidential election, the other parties unite against them, rallying behind an anti-RN vote rather than a preferred candidate vote, either by formal alliances, tactical voting agreements or even by standing down candidates from entire parties and getting those voters to unite with another party under leadership instruction.
This mirrors the German Establishment agreement not to work with or enter into any coalition with the AfD. Both the German and French systems are heavily weighted towards requiring coalition partners to form a government, so such an embargo means that the party that gets the most votes and the most support can be barred by back room deals or a sort of cartel-like collaboration to keep them out engaged in by all the other parties.
Regardless of popularity or democracy, the cartel controls the result. But sometimes it needs a hand from the judiciary, since as things grow worse and worse under continued globalist governance, the excluded party grows more and more popular.
The growth of populism and the failures of globalism are now such that the undeclared but iron-clad European break on populist policy increasingly has to expose itself for what it is – a decision by elites to ditch democracy altogether. It joins part of a global effort to keep out populist parties and leaders, as recognised by many commentators online:
As referenced in the above post, Europe is seeing multiple examples of the kind of treatment now offered to the French electors who wanted to vote for Le Pen. Others cite even wider examples:
Or this:
So what we are seeing is a consistent pattern of populist leaders being subject to lawfare, having elections they won overturned, being threatened with or sentenced to prison, or being blocked (at the least) by unelected judges from enacting policies that won them the election.
All of these actions are the consequence not of populist leaders being unusually criminal in their behaviour (which is the attempted and failed mainstream media narrative) or of their policies genuinely being extreme or dangerous (which is the other attempted smear) but far more obviously the consequence of a new (or newly more obvious) refusal from established parties and the ruling political and media class to accept that OTHER policies and OTHER leaders can be ALLOWED to win, and indeed must be allowed to win if you are any kind of genuine democracy at all.
It’s quite clear that what is happening is not that populists are extremists who must be excluded, but that populism arises because a kind of elite extremism is now commonplace, has become unpopular, and is prepared to behave in criminal, corrupt and conspiratorial ways to stay in power despite its unpopularity. Both growing public apathy to voting at all, and growing globalist efforts at using censorship to silence dissent and court rulings to ban or block other parties, are reflective of the abandonment of the democratic principle by the ruling elites challenged by populist parties.
In some parts of the world this is of course business as usual. Nobody would be particularly surprised at any point in Pakistan’s history, for instance, that the courts were used as a political weapon to exclude a popular candidate. That’s the standard thing there, if it isn’t a military coup. But for the Anglophone world, for the self-designated Free World, this isn’t supposed to happen (David Starkey gives an excellent explanation of the causes of this change, based on the postwar misinterpretation of Democracy as the protection of minorities rather than the representation of majorities).
We are supposed to have a system in which laws are applied evenly and without political bias or partisan power play intent. Our judiciary, police and courts are all supposed to be politically neutral in their actions and judgments, concerned only with even-handed justice. We aren’t supposed to have leaders who deny other people the right to political representation, who act against ballot results, or at a lower level ignore the instructions of elected officials who are supposed to be empowered to run the executive branch. In these senses the removal of Le Pen is on a continuum of tyranny and departure from democratic norms that globalists enact elsewhere too, and that obviously includes the lawfare practised against Donald Trump in its pre-first-term conspiracy of surveillance of Trump under false pretences as a candidate, in its first-term obstructionism and efforts at impeachment, in its Biden-term attempted criminalisation and imprisonment, and now in its second-term attempts to block every single Trump administration policy.
All these cases are about concocting reasons to remove populist candidates from the ballot or deny their victories if they win, and any one of the instances involved on close examination proves to be a false case with a partisan purpose. It’s almost irrelevant now to look at these individual cases (which is why I’m not bothering to give the details of the Le Pen case). What’s clear is that there is a pattern which is now well established and which isn’t about equality before the law and responding to corruption but exactly the opposite, about the extent of corruption already in place and how that leads to the end of equality before the law because the law, too, is now corrupted. The law becomes the last refuge of the globalist scoundrel, to be brutally applied when propaganda has failed.
All this is extraordinarily dangerous territory. France is still a major nation. It is a nuclear-armed nation. The possibilities of the combination of a street-level Muslim takeover with an elite level denial of populist responses and leaders are incredibly bleak, as are the prospects in my own nation where those elements of Muslim takeover and globalist denial of democracy also exist in abundance. But really this is not just about globalist desperation in the face of populist challenge. It’s even worse than that.
Globalism is an ideology that is vapid and intellectually and morally redundant, and many of its adherents are incapable of presenting any justification of it beyond jeers, sneers and labels. But it’s no less powerful because of that. Its absurd contradictions (such as simultaneously demanding universal support for LGBTQ+ public degeneracy and universal respect for patriarchal Muslim fundamentalism) function more as a feature than a bug, training the mind of its adherents in cognitive dissonance and self-blindness in ways that explain its capacity for both fanatical and extreme political choices and being completely unaware that it is fanatical and extreme.
It’s an ideology that alone among creeds is perhaps even better than Islam at installing the general determined incoherence of tyranny, the complete inability to recognise one’s own absurdity, and the capacity to do the exact opposite, and be the exact opposite, of what you claim to be and do. Just as an Islamic child rapist can still sneer at Western decadence (while having zero control over his own bestial urges) so too can the globalist defend democracy by removing it.
This article appeared on Jupplandia on March 31, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
