Each age gets the politicians it deserves. Ours has delivered up a rogue’s gallery of opportunists, strongmen and crooks: Trump, with his open defiance of the courts and lust for spectacle; Bolsonaro, whose family turned the state into a personal ATM; Netanyahu, on trial for corruption while presiding over a genocidal campaign in Gaza; Yoon, impeached for deploying martial law against his own people; and now Marine Le Pen, convicted of embezzling €4 million in EU funds while posing as the nation’s last honest patriot.
The rule of law, once the crowning achievement of bourgeois revolution, now appears to the political class as just another obstacle to be overcome.
Who Gets to Be the People?
Marine Le Pen’s reaction to her embezzlement conviction in Paris last week was instructive. It’s not that she denied the charge, her party had skimmed over €4 million in EU funds through a fake jobs scheme that ran for more than a decade. It’s that she made clear it didn’t matter. The people want her; the law gets in the way. “This decision has trampled on everything I hold most dear,” she told supporters at the Hôtel des Invalides. That is, her people, her country, and her honour, not the republic, not the judiciary.
Le Pen’s rhetorical sleight of hand, positioning herself as both victim and vessel of the people’s will, has become the hallmark of a political tendency that seeks to consolidate authoritarianism through the aesthetic of revolt. She even had the gall to invoke Martin Luther King, likening her legal troubles to the civil rights struggle. It wasn’t a misstep; it was the logic of her politics. For decades the far right has honed its ability to recode the language of liberation, national sovereignty, popular justice, civil rights, for its own project of elite restoration. Le Pen casts herself as a freedom fighter in a Chanel suit, hauled before the courts by the very rule of law she claims to defend.
It recalls the manoeuvres of interwar fascists who posed as insurgents against decadent liberalism while acting on behalf of capital. Like them, Le Pen’s movement casts itself as excluded and besieged—by immigrants, by Brussels, by the press, by the courts—but insists it alone speaks for “the people.” This is not contradiction but strategy. What the far right offers its base is not policy, but a promise: that popular legitimacy belongs to them and them alone, and that when the law obstructs this, it is the law that must yield.
Immunity as Programme
There is something circular in Le Pen’s defence: she claims the law has no authority over her because of her popularity, and her popularity, she insists, proves that any legal restraint is illegitimate. The real scandal, in this framing, is not the crime but the prosecution. That logic is now global. From Brazil to South Korea to the United States, the pattern is the same: the law binds the poor, disciplines the worker, cages the migrant, but becomes discretionary when turned against the political class.
In Brazil, the Lava Jato investigation exposed a vast system of corruption but selectively wielded its power. Lula’s imprisonment in 2018 was later deemed unconstitutional, yet the carceral populism of Jair Bolsonaro, a man whose own family faces corruption investigations, prevailed at the ballot box. In South Korea, President Yoon Suk-yeol was removed from office by the Constitutional Court after declaring martial law to quash protests. Here the judiciary acted, belatedly, perhaps, but decisively. Yet the fact that a sitting president could attempt a coup in all but name illustrates how fragile the line is between legality and raw power.
In the United States, President Trump, despite facing multiple indictments, has returned to office, exemplifying the entrenchment of elite impunity. He has reframed legal prosecutions as political persecution, turning court appearances into campaign spectacles. In February, his administration issued an executive order pausing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), citing national security concerns—a move that underscores the corruption of law to serve political ends.
This is not the decline of the rule of law but its reprogramming. The juridical form remains; its content is being emptied out and replaced. The law is not discarded—it is weaponised, selectively enforced, suspended at will. Immunity is not a loophole. It is the programme.
A World Without Consequences
What unites these cases is not just a shared authoritarian style but a growing bourgeois consensus: that the law should serve power, not check it. In this vision, legality is to be used against strikers, refugees, tenants and protesters, but ignored when it threatens capital or its political representatives. Le Pen, Trump, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Yoon: each has declared in their own way that the law cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the people. What they mean is: in the way of them.
This is the logic of what might be called the global bourgeois immunity pact. That’s why Le Pen’s allies include not just Jordan Bardella but also Elon Musk, Viktor Orbán, Matteo Salvini, and Donald Trump. When Bardella told the RN rally that Le Pen’s conviction was “a dark day in our nation’s history,” he wasn’t simply denouncing the verdict—he was rejecting the premise that the judiciary should ever stand above the political class. They do not want to govern within the law. They want to govern over it.
On the streets of Paris, the counter-rallies told a different story. “Nobody is above the law,” read the placards at Place de la République. But even that simple slogan reveals the problem. To say “nobody is above the law” is to admit that someone is, and usually has been. For centuries the law has bent to class power. What’s new is how openly the powerful now assert their exemption, how little shame they show in saying the law is for others.
The Le Pen case is not about a few misused parliamentary stipends. It is about whether the law is to be upheld when it matters most. From fraudulent expense claims to carpet-bombed refugee camps, the bourgeoisie’s crimes range in scale but not in kind. What links them is the belief that their violence, financial, political, or military, must remain untouchable. If liberal democracy fails to act, or acts only when convenient, the far right will do what it always does: seize the language of justice while burning its content. What the left must understand is that legality, like democracy, is never neutral. It must be fought for.
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