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Yesterday afternoon, the French Republic became the latest nominally democratic country in Europe to decide that democracy can no longer be trusted. The decision by a Parisien court to block Marine LePen from seeking the Presidency of the France in two years’ time, on foot of “embezzlement” charges that amount to very little, is nothing less than a direct assault on the right of French voters to choose their own leader freely.

We will start with the charges themselves: LePen has been convicted of using EU funds to pay the salaries of partisan political staff working for her political party, and of doing so improperly and in contravention of the rules of the European Parliament. The mixing of political and parliamentary funds is indeed a crime, and we take no issue with her conviction for it, however unlikely it may be that she and her party are the only offenders.

However, it is not merely LePen who has been sentenced: The court, in an act of capriciousness with few contemporary precedents, has decided to sentence all of her supporters as well. They are no longer to be permitted to vote for their preferred candidate to lead their nation.

Ms LePen has contested three previous French Presidential elections, and lost all three. Her best result remains the 41.45% of the vote she secured against sitting President Emmanuel Macron at the election of 2022. A fourth campaign may well have been successful, but the record also suggests a strong in-built resistance to her candidacy that would have been hard to overcome. However, current polling does suggest that she had finally broken through into a position where victory was at least conceivable.

There is a simple question which those who profess to believe in democracy must answer: Do the voters have the right to choose their own leaders, or do they not?

In Europe, the answer to that question is – increasingly – they do not. The LePen fiasco comes just weeks after a similarly capricious and disgraceful decision in Romania, barring a popular Presidential candidate from the ballot on entirely unproven charges of Russian interference to support his campaign.

Voters are neither stupid, nor blind: They will notice that these measures are not directed against candidates of the liberal center, nor of the left. They will notice, because they have eyes, that those increasingly being denied access to ballot papers in Europe come from a conservative, or nationalist, tradition. They will notice too that their exclusion from ballot papers comes after almost every other measure to contain and defeat their candidacies has failed, or has been perceived as likely to fail.

Late-stage liberalism in Europe asks us to be participants in this farce: It asks us to believe that Marine LePen is the first politician in European history to fund political staff from the public purse. It asks us to believe that her doing so is a crime of such magnitude that democracy itself cannot withstand the mere risk that voters might forgive or ignore that crime when asked to render judgment upon her. It asks us to participate in pantomime debates in which we are to pretend that she is being held accountable for her actions, rather than her views.

It asks us to ignore what is actually happening.

What is actually happening is very simple: Since Democracy is no longer delivering, reliably, results that secure European liberalism, Democracy is no longer the best form of Government except for all of the others. In truth, Europe has not been a true democracy for some time, and is better described as a modern technocracy with democratic baubles attached. The instincts of too many of those in power in Europe is to maintain the façade of democracy, but to curb its potential outcomes to a narrow range of political choices which preserve the over-arching structure and render the broad direction of European governance immune to voter choice.

And that, as such, is the message sent by the French Courts to the French voters yesterday: You may choose any President you wish, so long as it is from the list of candidates that we approve of.

This cannot, and will not, hold. The reason that Ms LePen was – per the polls – nominally in a position to win the French Presidency in the first place is that the technocratic consensus in Europe can no longer reliably command the support of a majority of voters. For better or worse, in truth or in falsehood, voters across the continent believe that their rulers have diluted their national identities, undermined their standards of living, and increasingly serve goals and objectives that are remote from the basic desires of those they govern.

At most, the action of European courts against candidates like LePen will delay the inevitable. At worst, it will make the inevitable backlash much more severe – and potentially extreme and destructive – than it ever needed to be.

Original article: Gript