In the grand, moth-eaten theater of the absurd that we call French jurisprudence, Marine Le Pen has taken the stage once again to perform her favorite role: the misunderstood martyr of the nationalist cause. The setting is an appeals court in Paris, a place where logic goes to be strangled by red tape and where Le Pen is currently attempting to explain why the European Parliament—an institution she purports to loathe with the fire of a thousand burning baguettes—was somehow footing the bill for her party’s domestic staff. It is the ultimate grift: a nationalist crusade funded by the very globalist bureaucracy it claims to be dismantling. If hypocrisy were a renewable energy source, the National Rally could power the whole of Europe, rendering their beloved Russian gas imports obsolete.

The core of the case is a delightfully banal 'fake jobs' scam. Prosecutors allege that Le Pen and her merry band of sovereignists diverted millions of Euros from the European Parliament to pay for party workers who did absolutely nothing for the EU. In any other profession, this would be called embezzlement. In the world of high-stakes European politics, it is apparently just a misunderstood accounting error. Le Pen stood before the court this Tuesday to reject the idea that there was any 'system' in place to siphon off these funds. Of course, she would say that. To admit to a 'system' is to admit to a degree of organizational competence that the far-right rarely possesses. It is far more likely that the siphoning was an organic, messy process of opportunistic greed, a spontaneous combustion of entitlement that occurs whenever a politician gets within ten feet of a public trough.

Let us take a moment to admire the sheer, unadulterated gall of the nationalist position. The National Rally spends its days screaming about the 'Brussels monster' and the erosion of French sovereignty, yet they seem perfectly content to let that same monster pay for their social media managers and office secretaries. It is the political equivalent of a teenager screaming that they hate their parents while simultaneously asking for an increase in their allowance to buy a leather jacket and a protest sign. The EU, for its part, is hardly the innocent victim here. The European Parliament is a bloated, regulatory vacuum where taxpayer money goes to die, or, as it turns out, to be 'reallocated' by people who want to burn the building down. The fact that such a 'fake jobs' scheme could persist for years speaks volumes about the level of oversight in Brussels. They were too busy regulating the curvature of cucumbers to notice that they were paying the salaries of the people actively plotting their demise.

Le Pen’s defense—that no such 'system' existed—is a masterpiece of semantic gymnastics. It suggests that if everyone in the party just happened to be using EU money for non-EU purposes at the same time, it was merely a cosmic coincidence. Perhaps the money just fell into their bank accounts by accident? Perhaps the 'assistants' were performing EU duties in their dreams? The court, however, was less than enchanted by this narrative last year when it barred Le Pen from running for office for five years. This, of course, triggered the predictable chorus of 'judicial overreach' from the Right, who view any attempt to enforce the law as a direct attack on democracy. They believe that if enough people want to vote for you, you should be allowed to steal as much as you like from the public purse. It’s a bold vision for the future, I’ll give them that.

On the other side of the aisle, the Left watches this spectacle with a performative indignation that is equally nauseating. They act as though Le Pen’s alleged corruption is a unique stain on the fabric of the Republic, conveniently forgetting their own long and storied history of 'creative' financing. The reality is that the entire political class, regardless of their supposed ideology, views public funds as a personal slush fund. The only difference is the branding. Le Pen wraps her grift in the tricolor flag; the centrists wrap theirs in the blue of the EU; the left wraps theirs in the banners of social justice. But the underlying mechanics are the same: the peasants work, the bureaucrats tax, and the politicians spend.

We are now forced to watch this legal tarantella play out until the heat death of the universe or until the next election, whichever comes first. Whether Le Pen is banned from office or not is ultimately irrelevant. If she is banned, she becomes a martyr for the 'persecuted' masses. If she is cleared, she becomes the conquering hero who defeated the 'deep state.' Either way, the public loses. We are trapped in a loop where the choices are between incompetent grifters who hate the system and competent grifters who designed the system to benefit themselves. In the end, the trial of Marine Le Pen isn't about justice; it’s about which flavor of institutional rot the French public is willing to tolerate for another five years. It is a tedious, expensive, and ultimately hollow exercise in maintaining the illusion that the law applies to everyone equally. It doesn't, it never has, and as long as we keep falling for the same nationalist-versus-globalist puppet show, it never will.