Farage and Le Pen make the same defiant pitch: Only the people can judge us
Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage announces his resignation as a member of parliament on Tuesday in London
Paris (CNN) — Let the people decide. That was the defiant message of two of the world’s most famous populists on Tuesday, as Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen announced, within hours of each other, their intention to defy their country’s norms in order to put the same pitch to the same jury, with both French and British mainstream politics now in the balance.
In France, Marine Le Pen took to the evening news to launch her defiant fourth run for the presidency, just hours after a court announced that legally she could.
In a sweltering courthouse in central Paris, journalists had crammed into overflow rooms to hear, just after lunchtime, a ruling on Le Pen’s appeal against the 2025 criminal conviction that found her, her far-right National Rally party and 11 of its most senior members guilty of embezzling millions of euros worth of European funds to pay the salaries of party-political workers in France.
On Tuesday, the ban on her standing for office was shortened but her conviction and sentence upheld, which meant Le Pen was still facing a year of home detention under an electronic tag, a condition she had previously sworn would make campaigning impossible.
Still, that evening, the woman who has spent a lifetime fighting, first to wrestle control of the party her father founded from him and then to detoxify it, announced she would fight on. She announced not only that she would stand but that she believed that a fresh appeal, to France’s highest court, would see her exonerated and that the people would be her only jury.
Across the Channel, Nigel Farage had just made a similar bid to the people. In a dramatic speech that made plain his fury over what he called the “establishment hit job” against him, the founder of the populist hard-right Reform UK party that – like Le Pen’s National Rally – tops national opinion polls, announced he was resigning from parliament.
After crediting himself for Britain’s departure from the European Union, known as Brexit, he made it clear he intended to turn the by-election his resignation triggers in his Clacton seat into a new referendum, this time on officials now investigating his finances.
The move suspended a parliamentary inquiry into an undeclared £5 million ($6.7 million) gift that The Guardian reported Farage received from a Thai-based cryptocurrency billionaire, and benefits that the Sunday Times reported that he accepted from a man convicted in the United States of fraud. Farage denies any wrongdoing, insisting Tuesday that he had “not broken the law in any way at all.”
At almost the same time, albeit in different languages and in very different political contexts, Le Pen and Farage announced moves that made clear they would not be contained but rather seek to upend the system.
Le Pen’s TV appearance, and a new campaign poster showing her arms outstretched and looking victorious, certainly suggest that she believes her legal troubles can now be made to work in her favor.
Ever since she lost to President Emmanuel Macron in 2022 with 41% of the vote, the grande dame of the European far right has been plotting her presidential run in 2027, even handing the leadership of the National Rally to her protégé, Jordan Bardella, in order to focus on the only prize that has ever really mattered to her.
And Bardella has delivered, leading the party to its first nationwide victory in the 2024 European elections, then to first place in the opening round of the snap parliamentary elections immediately afterwards. The party once dismissed as unelectable, the National Front of her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, is today the single largest party in the National Assembly and, polls suggest, the favorite to take the presidency.
And that is why the ban on her standing landed as a thunderclap in March 2025. What she had seen as her steady march to power, was frozen. At a rally immediately afterwards, she cast the ruling as a political verdict dressed as a legal one, a “witch hunt” in her words, and an affront to democracy itself. She had fought injustice for 30 years, she said, and would not be robbed of the presidency now.
From Washington, US President Donald Trump denounced the sentence as “lawfare” against a political opponent, posting on Truth Social “FREE MARINE LE PEN.” The Kremlin, Elon Musk and Hungary’s then-Prime Minister Viktor Orbán also chimed in with the same message: that the people, not the courts, should choose.
Le Pen made plain on Tuesday night that she believes she will not be under house arrest and wearing an electronic ankle tag as she campaigns – but that either way, the system can no longer stop her. Her new appeal is unlikely to be resolved until well into next year, by which point she hopes to be close enough to the doors of power for the entire judicial saga to look less like the independent decision it will be and a lot more like the political witch hunt she has cast it as.
Just as Trump fought the 2024 election with his own legal challenges, so Le Pen is now favorite to enter the Elysée under a judicial cloud that could be immediately dispelled by presidential immunity if she wins power.
Trump has not only provided the playbook, he has also, since his return to the White House, been the vocal and loyal champion of both Farage and Le Pen’s political careers. On Monday, he amplified a post casting the scrutiny of Farage as a rerun of the 2024 “anti-Trump playbook.”
In the case of Farage, Britain’s mainstream parties are ducking his challenge by refusing to field candidates against him in Clacton, meaning his only opponent is likely to be Count Binface, a persona created by a comedian aimed at poking fun at notable election candidates. Farage will hope the by-election will return him to parliament all but unopposed, his mandate renewed and his image as a man of the people capable of taking on the system, more Teflon-coated than ever. But if he is re-elected the inquiry will resume, and the comedic aspect to the battle also risks backfiring on him.
It is one script in two languages. The condemned figure recast as the victim and the law as an ever-weakening weapon of a frightened establishment. According to this script, the ballot represents absolution and neither the French nor the British system was built to answer it.
In each case, a politician is appealing over institutional bodies’ heads to the people and framing the appeal itself as proof of his or her persecution. That is the trap sprung Tuesday in two countries at once: the perfect populist playbook, and one neither France nor the UK looks able to contain.
The-CNN-Wire
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