It’s April 5, 2013, and Marine Le Pen – then president of the far-right Front national and a Member of the European Parliament – is speaking to Public Sénat, a talk show broadcast at the time by Radio Classique. She is being asked about Jérôme Cahuzac, a former Parti socialiste minister convicted of tax fraud. Le Pen asks: “When are we going to learn the lessons and actually implement lifelong ineligibility for all those who were convicted for acts committed thanks to, or on the occasion of, their mandate?”

Fast forward 12 years, and Ms Le Pen is denouncing her five-year period of ineligibility to run for public office in France, imposed as part of her sentence for embezzlement of European Parliament funds. Her allies have called it an attack on democracy, and many others have wrung their hands over whether her ban will bolster the French far right or be seen as a political decision. But her ban is not an attack on democracy, nor is how the Rassemblement National might spin it a relevant concern.

Let’s be clear about what Ms Le Pen was convicted of. In her ruling, Bénédicte de Perthuis – a judge specialising in financial crimes – found that Ms Le Pen was “at the heart” of a “system” of embezzlement of European Parliament funds. From 2004 to 2016, taxpayer money totalling €4.8m allocated to MEPs to pay their Strasbourg and Brussels staff was siphoned off by Front National to pay party workers in France who had no connection to work undertaken at the European Parliament.

The scheme used “fictitious contracts” to “remunerate people who actually worked for the party or the party leaders” in France. Ms Le Pen was found guilty of organising........

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