PARIS — The guilty verdict this week against far-right leader Marine Le Pen has turned French politics upside-down. While Le Pen retains her seat in Parliament and she can appeal a four-year sentence, the conviction for her role in a vast system of embezzlement of European parliament funds immediately bars her from running for president in 2027.
It is a brutal blow for the woman who, after falling short in a runoff for the presidency in the last two elections, was leading the polls to be the country’s next leader.
The decision triggered a wave of reactions in France, some welcoming the fact that Le Pen was “a defendant like any other,” others denouncing the interference of judges in politics as a basic undermining of democracy. Vincent Trémolet de Villers, writing in Le Figaro, defined the clash as “the law” vs. “the people.”
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France is just the latest in what appears lately to be a non-stop showdown on this fundamental tension of any democratic society: On the one hand, an independent judiciary that treats even the most popular political leaders like every other citizen; on the other, the risk of power-hungry prosecutors and judges usurping the will of voters to choose the leaders they want.
Much was made in the U.S. ahead of November’s election about the rash of court cases against Donald Trump. But even more recently, we’ve seen similar clashes around the world, from Turkey and Israel to South Korea and Brazil.
İmamoğlu 's mid-air stop in Turkey
Mayor of Istanbul Ekrem İmamoğlu and dozens of municipal officials were arrested and detained on March 26 by the Turkish police on terrorism and corruption charges. The arrest of the head of the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), who has long been considered as the main rival in the upcoming elections to current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, sparked the largest protests in a decade across Turkey.
The court based its decision of pre-trial arrest on witness testimonies, police reports and reports from Turkey's Financial Crimes Investigation Board (MASAK), although investigative journalists who inspected the reports said there are not solid findings in them. Ramazan Başak, a MASAK former deputy chair, said that the reports do not feature any findings concerning corruption.
Diğdem Soyaltın Colella, a Turkish politics researcher at the University of Aberdeen, describes what is happening as “a dark chapter for Turkey’s democracy”, but sees hope in the massive protests showing that democracy is definitely “still alive.”
Israel: the sword of Damocles of Netanyahu’s trial slowed by war
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces three separate cases of corruption that were filed in 2019, which include allegations of fraud, bribery and breach of trust.
Netanyahu is the first sitting Israeli leader to take the stand as a criminal defendant in the trial, which have been delayed due to the war between Israel and Hamas. The Prime Minister took the stand for the 14th time on March 4 to respond to allegations against him in a long-running trial.
If found guilty, Netanyahu could face up to 10 years in prison as well as a fine for the bribery charges, and up to three years in prison for the fraud and breach of trust charges. He also faces an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes in Gaza.
After winning the 2022 election, Netanyahu’s far-right government attempted to restrain the powers of the courts through a judicial campaign — triggering mass protests in Israel and international concerns about the future of the country's democracy. Israel’s parliament has passed a law expanding elected officials’ power to appoint judges on March 27, 2025.
South Korea’s disgraced presidents
South Korea’s former President Yoon Suk Yeol was impeached by his country’s parliament and suspended on December 14, 2024 after his attempt at martial law on December 3, which plunged the country into turmoil. He was arrested on January 15 and is now being investigated on charges of insurrection. South Korea’s Constitutional Court will rule Friday on whether to permanently remove the impeached President from office or reinstate him.
If the court affirms Yoon’s impeachment, a presidential election will be held within 60 days. Yoon’s scandal will likely undermine his party's long-term credibility and herald the return to power of the opposition Democratic Party at the next election. In this case, the next President would likely be Lee Jae-myung, the incumbent leader of the Democratic Party, who faces multiple charges of corruption.
South Korea has grown familiar to seeing top politicians in court. Former President Park Geun-hye was sentenced to 20 years in prison for corruption and abuse of power in January 2021, after three years of legal proceedings and final confirmation by the Supreme Court. Park Geun-hye was the first democratically elected South Korean president to be forced from office, after the country’s constitutional court upheld a parliamentary vote to impeach her.
Brazil, from Lula to Bolsonaro
In Brazil, a panel of Supreme Court justices last month confirmed charges against former President Jair Bolsonaro over an alleged attempt to stay in office after his 2022 election defeat, and barred him from running elections until 2030. He remains the most popular figure on the Brazilian right.
Even if Bolsonaro said he will appeal the decision, the former president still faces more than a dozen other cases, including one into his possible encouragement of attacks on the capital's government center by a mob of his supporters on January 8, 2025.
Previously, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who governed Brazil between 2003 and 2010, had been ruled out of elections by the country’s top electoral court in 2018 because of his corruption conviction in a huge bribery scandal for which he had been sentenced to jail for twelve years.
Lula was the front-runner for the 2018 presidency but was imprisoned at the time. His corruption convictions were later annulled by a Supreme Court judge in 2021 because the court that convicted Lula actually didn’t have jurisdiction to try him. This made him - then 75 years old - free to run for political office again.
Bolivia’s Morales finally out of play
In 2021, Bolivia's Constitutional Court disqualified former president Evo Morales from running for re-election in 2025. This announcement from the court reversed a ruling it had made in 2017 which effectively found that being able to run for re-election is a "human right."
Bolivia's first Indigenous president, Morales first took power in 2006 and was extremely popular until he tried to bypass the constitution and seek a fourth term in office in 2019.
Pakistan: jail for the cricket star-turned-politician
Former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan was sentenced to 14 years in prison over a corruption case in January 2025, in the latest of a series of charges laid against him.
Despite being in jail and barred from holding public office, Khan still looms large over Pakistan's political scene. Last year's election saw candidates backed by Khan winning the most number of seats out of all the parties. Khan's prosecution has triggered large-scale protests by his supporters, which have been met with harsh repression from authorities.
Trump: slipping through the net
On May 30, 2024, Donald Trump was found guilty by a jury of 34 counts of falsifying records in a hush-money trial. At the heart of the case were payments made to former adult movie actress Stormy Daniels to keep her silent in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election about her relationship with the businessman 10 years earlier.
Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony even if he was spared prison or a fine, but after his November election victory, the judge issued an "unconditional discharge" in the case that avoided punishment. The judge explained this was "the only lawful sentence that permits entry of a judgment of conviction without encroaching on the highest office of the land."
The case had sparked movements calling for justice to convict Trump, with others on the contrary supporting the defendant and denouncing “a political witch hunt.”
A conviction would not, however, have prevented him from running for the White House, as a clean criminal record is not a prerequisite for running for office. He would, however, have lost his right to vote under Florida state law.
Donald Trump was impeached twice during his first term — over claims he abused his power to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate his domestic political opponents and the other following the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot. But the Senate failed to meet the two-thirds threshold for a guilty verdict so he remained in office.
Even if the Senate had passed Impeachment, that would not in itself have banned Trump from running for re-election in 2024. An additional Senate vote on the issue would have been necessary.
Opponents out of the game in Senegal
Senegalese opposition leader Ousmane Sonko was sentenced in June 2023 to two years in prison for "corrupting youth." This conviction compromised his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election, and January of that year, the Senegalese Constitutional Council confirmed his non-participation by publishing the final list of candidates without his name.
That sentencing sparked violent protests, which left at least 16 people dead and hundreds injured, critics saying the government was using the judiciary to hound the opposition.
For his supporters, that brought flashbacks of the convictions that barred two strong opposition candidates ahead of the 2019 presidential election. Both Karim Wade, the son of former President Abdoulaye Wade, and Khalifa Sall, a former mayor of Dakar, were jailed for graft and corruption in 2015 and 2018, respectively.
Back in France, a historic corruption sentence for Sarkozy
Marine Le Pen’s conviction come just a week after prosecutors requested a historic seven-year prison sentence for former right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy, in his trial on charges of allegedly accepting illegal election campaign financing, in an alleged "corruption pact" with the late Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.
Prosecutors also requested a €300,000 fine and a five-year ban on being elected to office. Sarkozy, who served as French president from 2007-2012, denies the charges. He had already convicted and given a jail sentence in a separate influence-peddling case, a sentence he is currently serving with an electronic bracelet.
Even if Sarkozy had no plans to run for president again, his case is similar to Le Pen's in that it is the subject of the same media protest against the power of judges.
A few years back, François Fillon, the Republican Right's candidate in the 2017 presidential election, was forced out of the race by a scandal involvoing his wife's allegedly fictional employment a few months before the voting. While the courts definitively condemned him in 2024, it was the people who had cut it short in 2017 by excluding him from the race in the first round with 20% of the vote.