What's happened to Le Pen is scary

The Globalists are now brazen with their antidemocratic Lawfare

Charles-Henri Gallois is a dear friend of mine. I’ve known him since my days as an MEP when he set up the ‘Frexit’ movement. Today, he is a proud candidate for Rassemblement Nationale.

I spoke to him about the astonishing court ruling that means she will not be able to stand for President - despite being odds on favourite to win.

OLAF - the EU’s “anti-fraud” agency is no stranger to me.

It was an intensely snowy day. The bus from Flagey to Schumann crept along tentatively as whirls of fist sized snowflakes eddied above the frozen deserted cityscape. I had no choice but to make the trip across Brussels. I had been summoned to be interviewed under caution.

When I arrived at the OLAF megatower, having been scanned through giant X Ray machines, I was led to a small room with a desk. One chair for me. Two for them. The interview lasted 3 hours.

I was accused of running the UKIP Welsh Assembly campaign while in the pay of the EU to carry out parliamentary activity. A frankly ludicrous charge as I had resigned my position months earlier in order to carry out domestic duties. A simple check of their records would have cleared this up in moments. But it wasn't about that. It was a fact finding mission to try to unearth dirt on UKIP, interrogate their funding streams, find out who their donors were. Try to trip them up. They demanded to see my bank accounts and told me I had to detail exactly how the party was being funded. They even forayed into digging around previous work I had done as a consultant in foreign elections. All under caution, remember. And for three hours.

It was a dirty, intimidating yet routine exercise by a paranoid institution that wishes to vanquish its detractors by any means. I doubt the same effort ever goes into investigating parties on the Left. And believe me, the murky line between whether a European Parliamentary aide is doing domestic or EU focused word is traversed regularly by ALL parties.

So it doesn't surprise me that they went after Front Nationale, later to become Rassemblement Nationale. The Populist, Eurosceptic French Party led by veteran anti-establishment battleaxe Marine Le Pen. And currently leading in the polls with a momentum that suggests she is set to become the next Presidente de La Republique. Is? Was. Because they have banned her from political life for 5 years, before any appeal can take place. How very convenient.

Did the party misuse EU money? Yes. And a significant amount too. €4million is not a small sum. Was it an accident, or intentional? One assumes if wholly intentional it would be a very brazen act to have succeeded in extorting so much, and so one has to surmise they perhaps thought they were bending, not necessarily breaking, rules.

What is clear is that judges now decide the outcomes of elections, not voters.

While some say the punishment is baked into French law and inevitable, her exclusion from the political arena, the timing certainly makes this look deliberate. These offences date back a decade. At the very least the optics are terrible. And surely the judicial system’s first priority is to uphold democracy. Given the 37% polling of Le Pen, it is staggering no mitigation was put forward that this would represent a denial of democracy for over a third of the population.

The argument from Leftists and Globalists is always about the ‘threat’ of Populist parties to democracy.

But this simply isn’t true. Populist parties are winning elections and respecting constitutions.

It’s the Left that is undermining democracy. It tried to jail Trump, is about to jail Bolsonaro, and just sentenced Le Pen to prison. Banning leading candidates on technicalities is what autocracies do.

If Christine Lagarde and Ursula von der Leyen can occupy high offices without anybody showing any concern about their well documented nefarious activities, but Le Pen cannot run for office on the basis of a cooked up ‘crime’ that is probably committed by all parties in the European Parliament, then it is clear France is not "liberal" nor "democratic" in any meaningful way.

And France is not alone.

It is surely by miracle we have President Trump. Years of lawfare, demonisation and assassination attempts somehow didn’t stop him retaking the Oval Office..

But in Romania, anti-Globalist Călin Georgescu has been banned from running in the Presidential election, despite even winning the first round, with those results nullified.

The Irish Parliament is trying to block Conor McGregor from running for President of Ireland.

In the Netherlands, nobody will govern with Geert Wilders, despite the PVV winning the elections.

It is a pattern we are seeing play out over and over again. And in politics, there are no such things as coincidences.

The worry for Brits is what they might try to do to block a Reform victory in 2029.

But perhaps they have very few cards left to play. We are braced for their games. And must not let them win.