How would Spectator Australia readers react if Prime Minister Albanese was punished with a five-year ban from political office, a four-year prison sentence plus a $180,000 fine – because some of his staff had been discovered working for the ALP? Initial euphoria would be followed even among the most diehard Coalition supporters by a view that this was an affront to democracy.

Yet this is what the ‘embezzlement’ conviction against Marine Le Pen amounts to. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), of whom Le Pen was one from 2004 to 2017, are paid a monthly allowance, currently around €30,000, for staff assistance in ‘the exercise of a member’s parliamentary mandate’. The rule is supposed to stop funds being diverted into political parties’ coffers.  But the line between staffers’ assisting on parliamentary duties and broader party work can obviously get blurred.

Compliance tends to be investigated energetically when right-wingers and Eurosceptics are concerned. Thus, members of Le Pen’s National Rally were found guilty of spending a small portion of the allowance they received from 2004 to 2016 on party work, in Le Pen’s case €475,000. She was given the harshest penalty ever for breaching the rules, including that it applies immediately, not pending appeal. This usually applies only in cases of serious criminality and increases the chance she won’t be able to stand in the 2027 election – given that any appeal might not be completed by then. The 36 per cent of French voters who planned to vote for Le Pen – far more than for any other candidate – look likely to be deprived of that option.  The strong impression is of an establishment stitch-up to stop Le Pen because she’s the election favourite.

European Parliament rules are rarely enforced so fiercely. In one three-year period, between 2019 and 2022, 139 MEPs, almost one in five, were found to have breached them. But the ‘progressive’ and politically mainstream politicians among them almost without exception were simply asked to pay back disputed funds and that was the end of the matter. Macron ally François Bayrou, now France’s Prime Minister, was charged with similar rule-breaking to Le Pen, but was acquitted. Similarly, Christine Lagarde, another Euro-elite darling, was forgiven by the French courts for her fraudulent payment of €403 million of taxpayers’ money to a dodgy tycoon while she was French finance minister – allowing her to glide seamlessly from head of the IMF to running the European Central Bank.

Donald Trump, in demanding that Le Pen’s sentence be overturned, is absolutely right that the witch hunt against Le Pen is ‘another example of European Leftists using lawfare to silence free speech’. The claim by the French court’s presiding judge that Le Pen’s actions amounted to a ‘serious and lasting attack on the rules of democratic life in Europe’ is absurd. As Trump commented, ‘sounds like a bookkeeping error to me’.

Sadly, France is not isolated in its behaviour in this regard. Europe more generally has made a habit recently of eroding democratic freedoms. In Germany, because of the mainstream parties’ ‘firewall’ against the surging right-wing Alternative for Germany (AFD), incoming Christian Democrat Chancellor Friedrich Merz will form a coalition with the rejected, unpopular Social Democrats, who will resist the conservative policies more than half the electorate voted for.  Similarly in neighbouring Austria, the Freedom Party, the AFD’s counterpart, which won last October’s elections, has been sidelined for yet another soggy centre-left Euro-coalition. The same pattern was in evidence in December when Romania’s Constitutional Court cancelled the country’s presidential elections after the allegedly pro-Putin right-winger Calin Georgescu won the first round.  His views were deemed ‘contrary to democratic values’.

The Trump administration’s charge that Europe is drifting away from the shared values which underpin the transatlantic alliance should be a wake-up call. And it’s not just continental Europe but Britain that Washington is criticising. Vice President J.D. Vance has publicly attacked the general ‘infringement on free speech’ in Britain and specifically its ‘buffer zone’ law, allowing the prosecution of individuals silently praying in the vicinity of abortion clinics.

The State Department has pursued this issue, saying it was ‘disappointed’ by a British court’s most recent conviction under this legislation, using the sort of language Washington would have once used about a communist dictatorship: ‘We are concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom.’ However gently Trump personally treats Prime Minister Keir Starmer, his administration looks serious about getting tough with Britain on its cavalier approach to democratic freedoms. Washington’s response to London’s efforts to secure a free trade deal is reportedly, ‘No free trade without free speech.’

Starmer’s ‘buffer zone’ law is the tip of the iceberg in his regime’s deep erosion of democratic rights. This has included the re-enforcement of a two-tiered justice system favouring minorities and leftists and an ever more out-of-control police force which ignores government pressure to focus on real crime, not its preferred woke agenda of policing social media. Not to be outdone in the anti-democratic stakes, net zero enforcer Ed Miliband is scrapping the power of local councils to stop wind turbines – many three times the height of Big Ben – from carpeting the countryside. And because Labour worries that it might be humiliated by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in the 1 May local elections, it’s denied 5.5 million people the right to vote as it works on gerrymandering boundary changes. Labour’s sinister efforts to make a broadly-defined ‘Islamophobia’ illegal is a further threat to Britain’s increasingly wobbly status as a democracy.

Donald Trump’s foreign policies so far have been a mixed bag. He gets a gold star for support for Israel and tougher action against Iran and its proxies, as well as ratbag parts of the UN such as Unrwa and the World Health Organization. On Ukraine, he’s on a learning curve, discovering that it’s much more difficult than he expected to achieve a lasting peace with justice. On other issues – bullying Denmark over Greenland and caving in to Keir Starmer’s undergraduate anti-colonialism driving his desperation to pay China-friendly Mauritius to take British territory including Diego Garcia – the logic of Trump’s positions is mysterious.

Still, he’s on the money when putting the heat on Europe to correct its retreat from democratic values. We should hope he succeeds.