At the risk of just repeating a previous comment, if you actually want to live in a democracy you have to trust the electorate at some level. I don't know the specifics of this case but if it's clear cut corruption it should be easy to make that case to the electorate and absolutely destroy Le Pen in the election.
If it's not that easy, then banning her from running is even worse.
That's what happened - some officials trusted the electorate at some level and decided that the rules the electorate chose to make via their representatives should be followed. Those officials also trust the electorate to change the rules if they want to.
That's a very charitable way of explaining away literally anything.
Let me try:
It's not like Putin started a war, but rather some officials trusted the electorate at some level and decided that the rules the electorate chose to make via their representatives should be followed. The representatives being Putin and friends. Those officials also trust the electorate to change the rules if they want to.
There were no actual attempts at a coup btw, so the electorate is evidently happy with this.
Ultimately, rules come from the people in a democracy.
If they decide they want a candidate who broke the rules, that's where it gets messy in political philosophy.
Should the democratic will of the people from years ago or decades ago override the democratic will of the people now? Of course that's the general idea of having constitutions and such, but it can only ever be a matter of degree, and there's no right answer as to how much.
Rules should be followed. If when rules are broken no punishment is applied, the rules are meaningless. Once rules become meaningless, everyone will be emboldened to break the rules, to the detriment of society as a whole.
If you want the rules changed, vote for them being changed, don't give free pass for any asshole to break them.
But free, democratic elections is a "rule" too -- not just a rule, but a bedrock principle.
Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate? Why should someone from the past be allowed to nullify my preferred vote in the present?
There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office. The question is whether it's outweighed by other democratic concerns. It's messy.
> Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate? Why should someone from the past be allowed to nullify my preferred vote in the present?
All elections follow rules set by a previous electorate unless you want to first vote on defining the rules for an election every time you have an election.
If Trump were to actually run for a 3rd term, would you argue that he should be able to because term limits were set in place by a previous electorate?
Obviously they have to follow the rules for how to count votes, establish boundaries, etc.
But there is definitely a serious philosophical argument that term limits are inherently undemocratic.
I personally think they're necessary, but at the same time I realize they are undemocratic. They're literally taking away the ability for an electorate to freely choose.
All I'm saying is, the tradeoffs get messy. Restricting candidates from running can be a slippery slope. Look at what's happening in Turkey, where the popular opposition candidate was just barred from running. How do you know when you've gone too far? Barring candidates can corruptly entrench power, even when following the "rules" to the letter. What then?
This entire argument can be summarized as "no popular politician should ever have to obey any law." I realize you'll respond that you don't mean anything that extreme, of course. But the set of principles you're trying to articulate are, in fact, exactly that extreme. I don't want to live in that world and neither will you, when you have to experience it.
Erdogan has consolidated power independently and undemocratically and is using it to jail his opponents. That is completely different from this situation where a politician is engaging in anti-democratic actions and is then barred from running by an independent judiciary.
> term limits are inherently undemocratic
A society where the people are not able to participate in the electoral process is not a democratic society. True democracies represent the will of all people, regardless of whether they are part of the majority or whether they were eligible to vote in the single election which transitioned the political system from democracy to dictatorship.
Oh, Erdogan consolidated his power over the last few decades democratically. Rural turks came out in mass to vote for him over past decades. Incidentally, in the past he was actually jailed by his political opponents and banned from politics.
> Look at what's happening in Turkey, where the popular opposition candidate was just barred from running.
Ironically Turkey is in this situation precisely because Erdogan removed term limits and spent decades consolidating his power. Same with China where Xi Jinping did the same. And Russia with Putin. All prime examples of functioning democracies, right?
These rules are specially to prevent people from setting themselves up as emperor for life and if they are removed that's almost always the exact thing that happens.
Democracy isn't a perfect system, as much as Americans tend to believe it is. It needs some guidelines to keep it functional. And even with them it's a compromise, not perfection.
> Why was she the only one barred from running from office?
Because she was judged by an independent court and found guilty of embezzlement.
> Why not the other eight officials also found guilty?
I would have to read the decision to give this answer. Many things are considered when a judge gives out a sentence. Two murders may result in different prison length depending on circumstances, for example.
> The crimes of which Ms Le Pen has been convicted are serious, but not of the same order. France’s harsh sentence in this case limits the choice of citizens who are capable of judging for themselves who should get their vote. By creating a mechanism that politicians might be thought to have co-opted, the law encourages talk of conspiracy—especially if, like Ms Le Pen, the barred politician belongs to a party that is founded upon a suspicion of the elites.
> The danger of courts aggressively sentencing politicians is that both the law and the courts become seen as partisan. Judiciaries rely on citizens accepting verdicts with which they disagree. Elections are supposed to generate consent for the incoming government. A poll after Ms Le Pen’s conviction found just 54% of French thought she was treated like any other accused, a narrow margin of confidence in judicial independence. Among RN voters, 89% thought she was singled out for political reasons.
> France’s harsh sentence in this case limits the choice of citizens who are capable of judging for themselves who should get their vote.
That vote would be tainted by her embezzlement of campaign funds. The rest of this analysis is void once the author fails to consider how badly democracy can be damaged once election regulations are not respected.
Of course, the author may jave ulterior motives, and wants to defend Le Pen in this case because he wants to see democracy in Europe weakened from within. But I sm giving the benefit of doubt here and presuming stupidity rather than malice.
But voters would decide how much the embezzlement continued to matter, after she had already served time and paid a large fine. That would be the actual democratic outcome. Letting the people choose, as opposed to taking away their choice.
You, on the other hand, are presenting Marine Le Pen as a threat to democracy, presumably because you don't like the far right. But you're just one voter. Why not trust the electorate? Voters chose Giorgia Meloni and I don't see Italian democracy falling apart.
I'm not far right at all. I'm not even right. But I worry it's dangerous and will backfire to take choice away from an electorate because of some misuse of funds (that didn't benefit herself financially) that she is already being heavily punished for at a personal level. She's being punished. Voters shouldn't be by taking away their right to choose.
Only when the rules are respected by everyone involved.
If we are playing football (or soccer for the barbarians across the pond), a core principle is to score goals. If in the middle of the game I punch you in the face, that principle stops mattering super fast.
> Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate?
Because that is how rules and regulations work. If you want them changed, change them properly, don't go breaking them because your pet right wing politician was punished for breaking them.
> There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office
I fundamentally disagree. The only thing anti-democratic is to allow someone that does not respect the democratic rules for running for office, for they will undermine democracy from within.
> The only thing anti-democratic is to allow someone that does not respect the democratic rules for running for office, for they will undermine democracy from within.
Surely you see the catch in this belief. If there is a group of people who can "allow" others to run for election then the system is not democratic at its core.
Or if the judiciary has any sort of bias as is implied in this case. (I don't pretend to know the details)
I enthusiastically endorse the separation of powers and firmly believe that people should follow systems, not people. Perhaps it just a global coincidence, but the recent spate of candidate disqualification (US, Romania, Turkey, France) gives the appearance of democratic decay.
> Or if the judiciary has any sort of bias as is implied in this case. (I don't pretend to know the details)
Then don't assume the judiciary is biased by following up with a disclaim that you are repeating baseless conjecture. Le Pen was judged with her right to legal defense, found guity, and punished accordingly. This is democracy working as it should.
> I enthusiastically endorse the separation of powers and firmly believe that people should follow systems, not people.
Based on the content of your posts, I sincerely doubt your enthusiastic endorsement.
You are very quick to make excuses for the right wing politician that was punished for embezzlement, claimed repeatedly that her being banned from office is undemocratic, and claimed without a shred of evidence that the court that judged her is biased.
Forgive me if I think you are bullshitting me here.
> Perhaps it just a global coincidence, but the recent spate of candidate disqualification (US, Romania, Turkey, France) gives the appearance of democratic decay.
Comparing France to Turkey is pure bad faith argumentation. If you genuinely think that Turkey and France share any sort of democratic decay you are very ill informed.
If Le Pen was not punished, I would agree France was taking a step in creating its own French Erdogan.
You must be confusing my posts with someone else. Or claim doesn't mean what you think it means. Forgive me if it's difficult to forgive you when you place so much negative spin on what I wrote.
Only if those people act in anti-democratic ways. E.g. if they apply the law selectively, if they forego or restrict due process, and if they play around with the meaning of words and crimes then yeah, that's anti-democratic. For example, people brought up what's happening in Turkey, and I agree what's happening there is anti-democratic.
But if the people involved are not making up crimes, but prosecuting crimes; if they are not targeting people specifically, but enforcing the law that applies to everyone; and if they are allowing for the maximum possible due process, then there really isn't much of a case for that process being anti-democratic.
> There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office.
i’m curious, do you think age minimums are ok? i feel like with this opinion have to throw out all restrictions on the ability to run for office to be consistent.
You're acting like computers, or neutral actors external to the political system, decide "when rules are broken" and what "punishment" to apply.
That's entirely the wrong way to think about government. Government isn't about rules, it's about allocation of power. You have to think about government in terms of who is entrusted with power to make which decisions. If you entrust judges and lawyers to decide "when rules are broken" by elected officials, you give them power over those officials, and over voters.
Now that's okay to a degree, but the question is: where does the buck stop? If you design a system where the buck stops with lawyers and judges, then you've effectively given those lawyers and judges power to overrule voters. It's better to design a system where the lawyers and judges demur in situations like this, to avoid a "tail wagging the dog" situation where the legal system is invoked to resolve a political dispute.
You seem to have failed to see the thorniness of the problem maybe because in the current instance (Le Pen's ban by the French judiciary) you agree with the outcome.
Probably impossible to separate Le Pen's disqualification from the situation in the U.S. It's the song of the day. I seem to recall some account arguing in 2020, nominally on their expertise as a lawyer, that the election result could not be determined except in the courtroom. If you asked in 2020, should lawyers be disgraced if not disbarred for attempting to nullify the election - answer from GOP would be no. When asked today, suddenly answer is yes.
I agree only in the sense that K think that politicians should be punished for their wrongs.
I would only see thorniness is the courts refused to punish Le Pen out of fear of punishing a somewhat popular politician, as this would embolden others to act in ways to break the rules, and would undermine the independence of the court, which is a core tenet of a functioning democracy.
I think you only see thorniness here because you wanted Le Pen to keep doing her thing. See? it works both ways.
That's why we have nowadays Republics, with either written constitutions or fundamental legal texts like Habeas Corpus, not just pure democracies à la antique Athens.
The way out of your conundrum is to admit there is no "the People"; there is a collection of diverging, often incoherent trends, and no voting system is perfect (no voting system is even logical, as proven by Condorcet and Arrow[0])
Arrow is not at all "procedural", the French know it well: the 1995 presidential election ended with a Chirac vs Le Pen (the patriarch) duel, even though Lionel Jospin was the favorite and would have beaten both if he had faced them off... A clear example of non-transitivity in elections.
That's my point, sorry if it wasn't clear. Non-transitivity is resolved procedurally. We can theorize about Arrow all we want; in the meantime we can write rules that actually do produce electoral results.
My point is that it wasn't resolved: Jospin was the favorite, but the French were forced to choose between two candidates the majority of them loathed. The rules were a failure.
The definition of democracy according to Ricœur is:
> Est démocratique, une société qui se reconnaît divisée, c’est-à-dire traversée par des contradictions d’intérêt et qui se fixe comme modalité, d’associer à parts égales, chaque citoyen dans l’expression de ces contradictions, l’analyse de ces contradictions et la mise en délibération de ces contradictions, en vue d’arriver à un arbitrage.
In English, more-or-less:
> A society is democratic if it acknowledge that it is divided, which means that it contains contradictory interests, and if it creates modality to analyse and debate these contradictions so that we can reach arbitration, with each citizen having an equal share in the debate.
I don't believe that a society is democratic if a majority of the people have decided something that is harmful or unfair to a minority without properly having debated if this decision is fair or not for the minority.
Because of that, no, it's not "whatever the majority decides". In a democracy, the will to guarantee justice and fairness is more important than "the people", and if they say "there is suspicion of fraud from this candidate but let's just close our eyes because we like this person or because it is profitable for us", this is clearly a behavior where they are not trying to reach a just and fair situation.
This is what distinguish democracy from ochlocracy.
And I don't understand how people can really defend that we should ignore the justice/fairness condition: what is the point of following "the people" when these people are not trying to be just and fair? How will it be a good society?
> For democracy to work properly politicians need to follow the rules.
Democracy doesn't require that, except for a narrow subset of rules relating to voting and things like that.
The system you're describing isn't even democracy--it elevates lawyers and judges above the voters. Think about it: if there was a class of people you could trust to neutrally administer and enforce "the rules" then you wouldn't need multiple branches of government, separation of powers, etc. You could just make rules for everything, and trust the neutral arbiters to enforce those rules in politically neutral ways.
Here's one: Jacques Chirac was condemned in 2011 to 2 years with suspension (so, less than Le Pen) for something very similar (party members paid for fictitious jobs at the Mairie de Paris when he was mayor), and no ineligibility (so again, different consequences).
So it sounds like other politicians have indeed been convicted of similar things. The difference in punishment would then require you to examine the difference in the severity of the actions, which is beyond my pay grade.
> It seems that the system does work as intended after all.
Does it though? One common thread in the comments here is whether ineligibility is or is not warranted in political embezzlement cases. If hers is justified, how is the lack of Chirac's justified? That he was not seeking to be elected?
Whether or not it's actually a politically motivated difference, it's not a stretch that people question whether it is. Because it's a very convenient sentence. And let's face it, she was very likely to make it to the second round of the presidential election, and I can totally see a number of people being extremely bothered that it was a possibility, because if it did happen, if she wouldn't have won, it would have been very close (although who knows, a miracle could happen, and the political field might be less of a mess in 2 years).
> If hers is justified, how is the lack of Chirac's justified? That he was not seeking to be elected?
As stated in another reply, being sentenced to ineligibility for embezzlement is only possible since 2017.
It simply wasn’t a possible sentence in 2011. Note that this is not because it was considered too harsh. Ineligibility was systematic before 2010 as anyone condemned for embezzlement was automatically removed from voting lists for five years. However this was judged unconstitutional in 2010 (because it was automatic and sentences have to be individualised, ineligibility in itself is fully constitutional).
I think you're wrong here. A law can't be applied retroactively except if it would benefit the defendant and the RN case is about facts that happened before 2017.
Chirac's case happened more than 3 decades ago. Perhaps the judiciary had a different understanding on the gravity of those crimes back then. Perhaps what Le Pen did was more serious.
If Le Pen won, or if she would make to the second round is meaningless. The election would be tainted by having her running. That people are burthurt that their pet right wing populist became ineligible is of no substance. If anything it proves the courts are independent, and not acting to please a subset of the people.
Unsurprising. The laws making ineligibility a sanction for embezzlement, “Lois pour la confiance dans la vie politique”, is from 2017.
Note also that the 2011 verdict was somewhat unusual because before 2010 when this was judged unconstitutional, Chirac condemnation would have led to him being removed from the voting list for five years and therefore de facto ineligible. Chirac was “lucky” to be sentenced during the seven years window when ineligibility wasn’t possible.
I mean, "trust the electorate" sounds like a nice ideal, but I think it conveniently ignores the shithose of news and information that makes its way into the public discourse. We can't agree on basic facts in most places. What hope do we have to "trust the electorate" when most people are given straight propaganda and they buy it whole cloth.
If you want to live in the world where we "trust the electorate" you first have to figure out how to make the electorate informed. In the meantime, I would gladly accept equally applied and adjudicated laws as a way to remove corrupt individuals from the electable population. A lot of places do this already, so making it so someone can't run for a given election cycle seems like a relatively small slap on the wrist compared to barring felons from ever being allowed to vote or hold office.
They applied a law against corruption for which Le Pen herself voted. At some point, you need to trust the laws that elected members of parliament have enacted and also apply it to politicians.
At some level, yes. At the level of letting convicted criminals run for the highest office, no, that would be stupid.
> it should be easy to make that case to the electorate
It turns out if you have enough money for endless propaganda it is easy to make any case to the electorate. And who will be making the case anyway? The state cannot because it has to be inpartial in the elections; their opponents have a clear agenda (they want to be the president) so it's easy to dismiss their case.
So that leaves no one with standing.
> If it's not that easy, then banning her from running is even worse.
If the result is that a convicted criminal will not be elected into the highest office of the state, that's not a worse outcome, that's a perfect outcome.
Allowing some people to be above the law is a bad idea in general. Selecting elected officials to be above the law in particularly is ill-thought-out, IMO. Perverse incentives abound . Elections shouldn't be a get-out-of-jail card.
If it's not that easy, then banning her from running is even worse.