Want to know how Trump gets in? Just look at the coverage of Le Pen

The press takes a leading role destroying the rule of law

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

The truth of the Marine Le Pen story is simple. She fucked around. She got found out.

What did she actually do? You'd be hard pushed to find out, given that very few news outlets seem motivated to tell you. If you're really lucky, you'll get a brief mention of the court statements around paragraph 12, once all the populists got to have their say about how French democracy is being trampled over. So I'll tell you here, and I'll put it up top, above the digital fold, where it should be.

She and several other party figures took funds from the European parliament which were designated to support the party's work in that parliament and instead used them to hire officials in a totally different capacity back in France. This would be illegal pretty much anywhere.

It was not an administrative error. It was systematic, organised embezzlement. It was corruption, pure and simple, using funds which had been legally allocated for one purpose and then knowingly deploying them for another. This is why she was fined, sentenced to house arrest and barred from standing for public office for five years, unless she wins her appeal.

This is not the first time this has happened. French politicians are investigated for corruption pretty regularly. A few days ago prosecutors demanded seven years for former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. He is accused of having promised dictator Muammar Gaddafi that he'd improve French-Libyan relations if he funded his election campaign. Look at the news reports. Seriously, have a read - firstly because it's just a straight-up remarkable story and secondly because it is very revealing. Is there any mention of this being an affront to democracy? No. Is there an extensive description of the crimes he is accused of committing? Yes.

In 2011, another dreadful former French president, Jacques Chirac, was found guilty of corruption. The charges are similar to those faced by Le Pen. He was accused of paying members of his party for jobs that did not exist. He was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for diverting public funds and abusing public trust. Fucked around. Got found out. Read the BBC report from the time. Is there any mention of an affront to democracy? No. Is there an extensive description of the crimes he is accused of committing? Yes.

And now let's see how Le Pen's conviction has been covered. I really like Politico's European newsletter. I rely on it extensively - it's an incredible resource. And despite what I’m about to say I’d advise you to sign up to it. But the gap between their story on Sarkozy last Thursday and their newsletter on Le Pen today is incredible. We open with Le Pen in her own words, allowing her chosen message to open the piece. We're then told that she was "a strong contender" to win the French presidency in 2027 and that this ruling means "it's not a popular rejection by the demos". For the record, Le Pen has been rejected by the demos twice, in the French presidential elections of 2017 and 2022. Then we're taken on an extensive tour of every populist, on right and left, who objects to the verdict. On and on it goes, like a dinner party from hell: Geert Wilders, Viktor Orban, Yanis Varoufakis, Donald Trump. A banquet of cunts, every one of them giving their two-cents worth.

Look at the story on the BBC, from the usually brilliant Katya Adler. Exactly the same. "Le Pen's right-wing European allies condemn court verdict as threat to democracy," the headline reads. Nearly every BBC piece on Le Pen follows this populist framing. Not one of the headlines focuses on the crime. One focuses on the effect on the far-right. Another quotes Le Pen in the headline calling it a "political decision". And a fourth headline says it's "making some nervous about French democracy".

Remember: a journalist does not have to adopt this framing. As a reporter or an editor, you can adopt a different frame. You can focus on her crimes. You can focus on her corruption. You can ask how she was able to get away with it. You could ask if the European parliament is vigilant enough on the use of public funds. You could see if this practice is more widespread among other parties. There are countless angles which do not involve accepting the populist narrative. But over and over again, that is precisely what journalists do.

This is not about right and left. I despised Chirac and Sarkozy, as I imagine most readers of this newsletter did. It is about the mainstream versus populism. Why are mainstream politicians denied the kind of generosity populists are granted? Why are they not allowed to define the manner in which the story is told? Why are their crimes magnified while those of the populists are barely mentioned? Why are their trials considered criminal matters while those of the populists are treated as a danger to democracy? Why are their days in court covered like a moment of personal shame and humiliation, while those of the populists are treated like an act of combative resistance?

This is all taking place on the more respectable end of the spectrum, from journalists I admire working at publications I like. How are the others behaving? As you'd expect. The Telegraph insists that "Le Pen will be made a martyr" and the "far right have their Joan of Arc". The paper's editorial states that "those who fear the judgement of the people favour the judgement of the courts". Over at the Spectator, we're told of "the hypocrisy behind Le Pen's disqualification" and that "this ruling against Marine Le Pen is grotesque".

I wonder if there was this degree of sympathy about the misuse of funds when the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon was arrested and then cleared in a not dissimilar matter involving public donations? Was there fuck. No, this type of thing only works one way, from publications which would never admit to supporting the far-right but who seem to always go out of their way to help it.

To forgive Le Pen is to say that those in politics are allowed to break the law with impunity. Once you do that, your basic political standards have crumbled into the fucking dirt. They're gone. Anything that is worth preserving about our society has disintegrated. We will have accepted that the rule of law does not apply and specifically that it does not apply to the powerful. This was the first of all liberal lessons we had in the wars against kings. To tolerate it now is to regress back, past the Twentieth Century, over the Napoleonic era, to before the Glorious Revolution.

Except it's not really that, is it. It's not about all leaders at all, as the coverage of Sarkozy and Chirac shows. It's just about the far-right. For some inexplicable reason, this category of political operator, precisely the sort who used to be held in the most contempt, are now granted the kind of generosity usually reserved for Hollywood celebrities on a press junket. The very worst politicians - the most prejudiced, the most corrupt, the most cynical, the most divisive - they are the ones we treat with kid gloves. We eagerly seek out their narrative and adopt it ourselves. And in the process, we help them dismantle the social norms which hold liberal democracies together.

We should all take a good hard look at what's happening in the US. Not the noise or the clamour, but the bleak constitutional reality of it. This is what happens when you give up on the rule of law. A president who talks openly about going for a third term, who signs executive orders which contradict his country's constitution, who got a rigged supreme court to grant him immunity, who ignores court orders, who has his underlings hand out massive million dollar cheques to people to induce them to vote, even though it is explicitly against state law. To watch the United States is to watch the law dissolve into authoritarian government.

How did it start? With supporters who no longer cared if their hero followed the law or not. And it then continued with newspapers which treated his criminality as irrelevant, with voters who handed him a mandate anyway, and with the courts and law enforcement authorities becoming too subdued to properly challenge him.

It can happen here. Don't ever think it can't. Those articles about Le Pen make it pretty clear. If it happened to Farage, they would respond in precisely the same way. Respectable outlets would frame the stories in his chosen manner while right-wing outlets explicitly supported him. But if it happened to Keir Starmer, of course, it would be entirely different. The coverage would focus on the wrong-doing and the right-wing press would attack him.

That disconnect between the treatment of mainstream politicians and populist politicians helps explain so much of our current predicament. People love to attack the media. But if anything we understate their role in present events. Things will not improve until reporters show a bit more introspection, and a good deal more consistency, than they are right now.