Whether it’s Nigel Farage’s secret multi-million pound crypto donations, or Marine Le Pen’s corruption conviction, anything that catches the far-right out is, by default, against the will of the people.
Portia Kentish
Marine Le Pen has had a rollercoaster week. Last Tuesday, she left a Paris courtroom having been found guilty (again) of embezzling more than €2.8m in EU funds into her party, the far-right National Rally, between 2004 and 2016.
Come Wednesday, she had launched her campaign for the French presidency.
Across the channel, her ideological bedfellow Nigel Farage’s week was also eventful.
Already under investigation for secretly accepting £5m from a crypto billionaire, for whom he is accused of lobbying the Bank of England, Farage had to then beat away a Sunday Times investigation into support he received from another crypto fraudster.
His response? Resign from his Clacton seat and trigger a by-election to prove he can win it all over again.
This seems ironic coming from two darlings of European populism, intent on getting rid of the so-called corrupt establishment elite. But for Le Pen and Farage, the law, when applied to them, is not so appealing. Rather, it is “baseless and contrived” or simply “mistaken”.
So how do the far-right so brazenly – and successfully – ignore the very system they hold Europe’s mainstream parties to?
By labelling their opponents as defenders of a broken status quo and, in turn, an affront to the electorate. For those to whom rule of law still appeals, there will be bigger battles ahead.
An anti-corruption stance is an easy win for any politician. It is one of the few issues in politics that everyone agrees is bad. It becomes especially easy for outsider politicians when the public is dissatisfied with the current system, which is almost always.
Over two-thirds of Europeans believe that corruption is widespread in their country and half think their government is bad at combatting it. It is low hanging political fruit for a populist to come in and promise to “drain the swamp” of a seemingly skewed system.
Different rules for the far-right
When a scandal hits centrist or leftist parties, they often struggle to get past it.
In part, because they at least claim to play by the rules. When the far-right get caught up in scandals of their own, however, they can expand this “swamp” not just to encompass the government but the entire justice system.
The law becomes a weapon of the elites, not a way to hold them to account. Or, as one Clacton voter put it, “at the end of the day it’s a witch-hunt by other backstabbing MPs”.
Recently Spain’s Vox and Germany’s AfD have also faced questions about their finances. But they can, and have, portrayed investigations into them as proof that the system is rigged against them, and their popularity seems to bounce back just fine.
Under this view, anything that catches the far-right out is, by default, against the will of the people.
After announcing his by-election, Farage tweeted “it is the people of Clacton who gave me a mandate. It is they who should judge my actions.”
Le Pen also seems keen on bypassing the justice system entirely, stating that even if her appeal to France’s higher court ruled against her “the French will be the judge”.
Of course, letting integrity fall to identity and leaving it up to the elusive “people” could quickly leave the whole world blind. But who needs to play by the rules of an apparently corrupt system when you can defer to the people?
For most of Europe’s far-right parties, this “swamp” may be larger still. To them, corruption, as Jason Stanley puts it, is not embezzlement and the like. It is a system that is no longer made in the image of white, male supremacy — a “corruption of purity rather than of law”.
One does not have to look far to see Europe’s far-right politicians branding women, Muslims, queer people and ethnic minorities as part of this liberal establishment’s “woke ideology” (no matter how badly these groups still suffer under it).
A country’s law tends to reflect its dominant ideology. But as Farage and Le Pen make all too clear, Europe’s largely liberal democratic legal system, for all its flaws, is increasingly clashing with the far-right ideology creeping across the continent.
As the most popular politicians in Britain and France make a justice system of their own — that of the “people” — it will become increasingly difficult for mainstream parties to win the corruption argument. It will become harder still when the groups a liberal society should protect are not asked to be part of this populist jury, but put on trial themselves.
Farage has already called his by-election a chance for the people to “stick two fingers up to the entire establishment”, standards investigations be damned.
One only need turn to Viktor Orban’s Hungary to see how quickly these guardrails can be dismantled — and how society’s most vulnerable are the first to suffer the consequences.
