Cheers went up at that European Parliament as it lifted the immunity from prosecution of its member Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far right National Front. Unfortunately, it is likely that Le Pen herself was also cheering.
She has been under investigation for inciting race hatred. In response to a journalist who compared the National Front to Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS), she sent on social media three graphic images of Daesh executions. It was distasteful and wrong. The family of one of the victims, journalist James Foley, rightly complained, even though the images of their son’s beheading are widely available on the Internet, which is where Le Pen found them. Their anguish can only be imagined. But the problem here is that the journalist who compared the National Front with the terrorists was also wrong and on two levels.
First, hideous though the National Front certainly is, it is not a terrorist organization. But second, precisely because the accusation was so wide of the mark, it gave Le Pen the chance to pull this objectionable social media stunt. Now the Establishment, which loathes the woman, is seeking to prosecute her for racism over the pictures.
The problem is that now that Le Pen’s EU parliamentary immunity has been lifted if the prosecution goes ahead, it will only benefit the National Front. If the woman is found guilty and fined or even imprisoned, she will become a heroine. It is not hard to imagine the National Front getting up a nationwide subscription to pay any fine and claiming that the sum was raised within hours, even if that were not actually true. If she is cleared, it will seem a vindication of what she did.
There is plenty for which the National Front can be attacked. Its barely-hidden Islamophobia and its general racism are still around even though under Marine Le Pen’s leadership, there have been major efforts to sanitize the more overt bigotry and barely concealed hatred from the days when her father founded and led the party. But with Le Pen almost certain to make it to the run-off vote for the French presidency, it is high time that the Establishment began to choose its battles more carefully. Carpet-bombing her reputation and policies could be as counterproductive as the endless US media raids on Donald Trump.
The French Establishment should not make the same mistake as its American counterpart. Voters in both countries are fed up with self-serving governments who seem to do nothing to better the lives of ordinary people but are busy feathering the nests of a small elite. In the United States last November, Trump won because the Establishment hated him and the electorate had come to hate the Establishment.
The same mechanism could very well be at work in France. Le Pen needs to be confronted politically and economically for the devastation that her hate-filled policies will bring to France, to the EU and to France’s position in the wider world, not least the Middle East and North Africa. She will not be stopped by a questionable prosecution over some pictures. Indeed, the greatest danger is that this ill-conceived action could actually boost her standing among French voters by making her seem a persecuted victim.
