Tag Archives: Marine Le Pen

Trump Denounces Lawfare Being Used to Silence Marine LePenUS State Department reacts to Le Pen conviction

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Trump Denounces Lawfare Being Used to Silence Marine LePenUS State Department reacts to Le Pen conviction

The veteran conservative politician has been barred from the 2027 presidential race

US State Department reacts to Le Pen conviction

Marine Le Pen speaks during a campaign event in Henin-Beaumont, France on May 24, 2024. ©  Christian Liewig / Corbis / Getty Images

The US has condemned the prison sentence handed to veteran French conservative politician Marine Le Pen, who was found guilty of embezzlement and banned from running for president.

On Monday, a Paris court ordered Le Pen, the former head of the National Rally (RN) party, to serve four years in prison, of which two will be suspended, and banned her from holding office for five years. If not overturned, the verdict would effectively bar her from the 2027 presidential election.

The prosecution accused Le Pen of misusing the EU funds intended to pay for her aides when she was a member of the European Parliament. According to the newspaper Le Monde, the prosecutors argued in court that Le Pen and other RN politicians diverted the money to pay for the party’s activities in France. Le Pen has described the verdict as politically motivated and promised to launch an appeal.

US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce drew parallels between the case in France and the criminal prosecution of President Donald Trump under the Biden administration. 

“We’ve got to do more as the West than just talk about democratic values. We must live them,” Bruce said.  Read moreLe Pen blasts sentence as ‘political’

“Exclusion of people from the political process is particularly concerning, given the aggressive and corrupt lawfare waged against President Trump here in the United States. We support the right of everyone to offer their views in the public square, agree or disagree,” she added.

Bruce noted that, in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vice President J.D. Vance criticized Germany and other American allies in Europe for what he argued were attempts to restrict political competition. “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t,” Vance said. 

RN President Jordan Bardella has accused the authorities of seeking to eliminate Le Pen from the 2027 election. “They are depriving millions of voters of their choice and therefore of their freedom,” he said.

Le Pen ran for president three times, placing second in 2017 and 2022

France Bans Génération Identitaire

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France Bans Génération Identitaire

Dale Bennett (Editor) · 6

A SIGNIFICANT activist group within the French anti-immigration movement — the youth movement Génération Identitaire (‘Generation Identity’) — is now facing official banning orders.

This is taking place while Marine Le Pen’s multi-culti and multiracialist but anti-mass-immigration party remains a leading contender for next year’s French presidential election. (Indeed, as reported in the latest edition of H&D, recently a supporter of incumbent ‘centrist’ President Emmanuel Macron sought to outflank Mme Le Pen and her Rassemblement National by portraying her as having a more moderate line on Islam than the French government.)

Interior minister Gérard Darmanin — the same man who sought to outflank Marine Le Pen by positioning himself as even more anti-Islamic in last month’s debate — began proceedings in that very same week to ban Génération Identitaire for “incitement to discriminate against a person or group because of their origin”.

The banning order has now been confirmed.

Génération Identitaire has frequently gained media attention with stunts, beginning in 2012 when its activists occupied the roof of a mosque under construction in the city of Poitiers. In August 2019 three members were imprisoned for impersonating police officers during Génération Identitaire’s most successful stunt which involved blocking the Franco-Italian border on Alpine roads. https://www.youtube.com/embed/RZKu9GrjXpQ?feature=oembed

Whereas Marine Le Pen and her group have concentrated on winning White working class support and have toned down explicit ‘racism,’ Génération Identitaire support tends to come more from middle-class students: The organisation blatantly campaigns against a cultural and implicitly ethnic threat to French identity [though, to your editor’s knowledge, they never publicly mention Jews as the main source of said threat — Ed.].

The type of banning order being sought against Génération Identitaire was most recently used in November 2020 against the French arm of the ‘far right’ Turkish paramilitary organisation Grey Wolves, who had been involved in militant anti-Armenian and anti-Kurdish campaigns, as well as conflict with the Gülen movement, a controversial sect that was allegedly behind the 2016 coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The type of banning order being sought against Génération Identitaire was most recently used in November 2020 against the French arm of the ‘far right’ Turkish paramilitary organisation Grey Wolves, who had been involved in militant anti-Armenian and anti-Kurdish campaigns, as well as conflict with the Gülen movement, a controversial sect that was allegedly behind the 2016 coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Several French ‘far right’ groups have been banned in recent decades, including former paratrooper Mark Fredricksen’s national socialist FANE, eventually banned for good in 1987; the PNFE, once closely linked to the Tyndall-era BNP and banned in 1999 after years of legal persecution; and the Third Positionist group Unité Radicale, banned in 2002. To some extent Génération Identitaire grew out of this latter group.