Let's be direct: what France has just offered the world with the verdict of the Paris Court of Appeal is not a lesson in serene justice; it is a striking demonstration of our institutions' inability to reconcile judicial timing with democratic timing. Regardless of what one thinks of Marine Le Pen, her party, or the substance of the parliamentary assistants' case: the simple fact that a country the size of France is still, ten months before a major presidential election, debating whether a potential candidate will physically be able to travel to campaign, is a collective failure.

A political, not judicial, failure

This failure is not primarily judicial. The magistrates did their job, with the rules they have, and no serious person should blame them for having investigated a public funds embezzlement case for twelve years before judging it twice. The failure is political and legislative. For years, everyone has known that legal cases involving presidential candidates can emerge at any point in the electoral calendar, and no one has deemed it useful to clarify, once and for all, the rules governing the interplay between ineligibility sentences, provisional enforcement, and the right to run for election. The result: improvisation, interpretation, recalculation of months of supposedly served sentences, and allowing an appeal to the Court of Cassation to suspend judicial decisions just a few steps away from a major election. This is the zero-degree of legal predictability.

Twenty years of parliamentary inertia

Let's take a step back. A mature democracy should never find itself discovering, live, during an 8 PM news broadcast, the articulation between three different jurisdictions and the fate of a presidential candidacy. It is not Marine Le Pen's fault that the French judicial system handles this type of case with such a lack of anticipation. Nor is it the fault of the judges, who are compelled to rule based on existing texts. It is the fault of twenty years of parliamentary inertia on a subject long identified as a major point of friction between the rule of law and democratic life.

Justice commented on at 8 PM

And what about the communication that followed? A judicial decision announced on a Tuesday afternoon, commented on that same evening on a private television set, with a candidate explaining her procedural strategy — appeal to Cassation, suspension of sentences — before millions of viewers, even before the Public Prosecutor's Office had made its own position known. One could find it amusing if the stakes were not so serious: the credibility of judicial discourse itself. When each political camp chooses its own interpretation of the verdict — some crying foul play, others impunity — it is the common foundation of trust in the judicial institution that erodes a little more.

Legislate, finally, serenely

It is time for the French political class, of all persuasions, to stop instrumentalizing such affairs according to their immediate electoral interests, and finally legislate serenely on the judicial status of presidential candidates. As long as this task remains shelved, every new judicial case affecting a major candidate will lead to the same spectacle: institutional suspense, heated editorials, and a diffuse feeling among the public that justice is being done in the political marketplace rather than in courtrooms.