Equality by lot

The recent judgment against Marine Le Pen in France has been compared to the decision against Georgescu in Romania. In each case a prominent “extreme right wing” candidate in a European country has been barred from participating in an election campaign in which they had a fair chance of winning. In fact, however, Le Pen’s case is much more similar to that of Turkey’s Imamoglu than to Georgescu’s.

First, unlike Georgescu, whose electoral win was retroactively annulled and who was barred from an election that is merely weeks away, Le Pen’s and Imamoglu’s electoral potential in elections that are years away is speculative. Second, and more importantly, while Georgescu was disqualified on openly political grounds, Le Pen and Imamoglu are being disqualified due to being convicted for illegal actions (or may be convicted and disqualified in the case of Imamoglu who has been arrested but not convicted or officially disqualified yet, I believe). The merits of the cases against Le Pen and Imamoglu may (or may not) be very different, but unlike the case of Georgescu, formally these cases are of the same type in the sense that they are both matters of legal determination rather than of setting political limits on candidates.

Needless to say, it is taken for granted in the West that Le Pen’s criminal conviction and subsequent disqualification is no more than a legitimate application of well-justified anti-corruption laws, while Imamoglu’s disqualification is a blatant case of political suppression and persecution. However, other than by relying on a-priori good and bad opinions about the political systems involved, anyone who does not invest significant effort doing a fair amount of independent research cannot tell that one case is motivated by the public good while the other is motivated by narrow interests.

Indeed, in an electoralist system, any political figure who is prosecuted for straightforward criminality of uncontroversial nature, and certainly any major political opposition figure who is prosecuted such as Le Pen, Imamoglu and, until recently, Trump, can credibly claim that they are being targeted by powerful political opponents who control the judicial process. On the other hand, it is obvious that the public has a strong interest in identifying and punishing corrupt politicians, and in particular powerful ones.

The dilemma is thus insoluble. Even if a system is largely free from criminality and truly attempts to identify and punish politicians for illegal activity in an even-handed manner, the citizens who support a criminal politician’s positions on public matters have no objective way to know that the politician is being justly punished and may very well suspect that it is the politician’s positions and policies that are the real cause behind their legal troubles. Such suspicions may very well undermine trust in the entire system. Under such circumstances, a well-meaning public-minded prosecutor may even be tempted to avoid going after corrupt politicians in order to avoid the fallout. But of course in the somewhat longer term such reluctance would only exacerbate the problem as would be, quite rightly, perceived as an example of the political system prioritizing its own stability rather over following its purported principles of justice.

What’s a poor electoralist system designer to do?

Filed under: Elections, Press |