In a cruel twist of history, France, the self-proclaimed cradle of the Enlightenment and freedom, has turned into a regime where democracy is nothing more than a mask, concealing a dictatorship that is still in its infancy but nonetheless unflinching. It is not a dictatorship of boots and uniforms; it is a hushed tyranny, judicial and institutional, crushing any hint of real change under the weight of its legal trappings.
I. France, a formal dictatorship: the judicial elimination of opponents
In a democracy, elections are the inviolable sanctuary of the popular will. In the France of 2025, justice, like a partisan guillotine, falls on opposition figures with surgical precision, rendering them supposedly too disqualified to compete. Examples reveal a damning pattern: searches (National Rally party), convictions (François Fillon, Marine Le Pen, Nicolas Sarkozy), smear campaigns (Éric Zemmour).
On March 31, 2025, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced Marine Le Pen to five years of electoral "ineligibility" with immediate effect, in the so-called European parliamentary assistants case. This sentence, described by the defendant as a "witch hunt", bars the frontrunner in the polls from standing in the 2027 French presidential election.
The aim of this maneuver is clear: to remove the opposition leader from competing for the highest office in the land. The judges justified their decision on the grounds of misappropriation of European funds for the party's national activities. Money it seems, intended for the party's operations at European level was instead used by the national party in France. That is the whole story. It is a far cry from a violent crime or personal enrichment. No personal enrichment on the part of Le Pen was ever found. The timing of this ruling and the provisional exorbitant enforcement, betray the manipulation of the justice system by her opponents.
This is not an isolated case. The legal persecution of Le Pen's National Rally is far from over. On July 9, 2025, in Paris, around 20 police officers from the financial brigade, accompanied by two investigating judges, raided the headquarters of the National Rally at dawn as part of a new investigation supposedly into illegal campaign financing. During the raid, accounting documents, correspondence, laptops, hard drives and servers were seized, all targeting the financing of the party's recent campaigns. Apparently, they included loans granted by individuals and some alleged overcharging to obtain undue reimbursements from the state. The Paris public prosecutor's office said that the investigation aimed to determine whether these practices constituted fraud, aggravated money laundering, or forgery.
The president of the National Rally party, Jordan Bardella, denounced the operation as "spectacular", "relentless" and a "serious attack on the pluralism of the political system and democratic alternation." Bardella said he believes that "no opposition party has ever been treated like this under the Fifth Republic."
Also in July 2025, another case unrelated to the previous two, involving €4.3 million in European funds misused by the Identity and Democracy Group, of which the National Rally was a member, was threatening the integrity and reputation of the party.
National Rally leaders are crying foul, not without reason: are these operations really aimed at ensuring the proper use of public funds, or are they paving the way for the National Rally to be outlawed? The pattern is chilling: weaken, discredit and potentially dissolve the main rival of the alliance between the moribund Macron camp and the Islamo-leftist forces of the France Unbowed party. Macron's Renaissance party had earlier allied itself with the France Unbowed party to "block" the main opposition force – Le Pen's National Rally.
Since 2017, militant magistrates have become emboldened. On January 25, 2017, in what will probably go down in history as the inaugural act of this judicial jihad, the satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchaîné revealed the fictitious jobs of the wife of candidate François Fillon and his children as "parliamentary assistants." A preliminary investigation was opened -- that same day -- against the poll favorite for the presidential election by the National Financial Prosecutor's Office. Fillon, charged with embezzlement of public funds, saw his campaign collapse. He fell from 26% in the polls in January, to 20% in the first round. Behind Macron and Le Pen, he was immediately eliminated. Without the Financial Prosecutor's Office, Emmanuel Macron would most likely never have become president.
Sentenced in 2020 to five years in prison, including two without parole, Fillon announced that there had been a "media-judicial conspiracy". As with Marine Le Pen, the justice system did not merely punish; it changed the course of the election, depriving the right of a winning candidate.
To be clear: what Fillon did was stupid and despicable. But Fillon is part of a "long tradition," as La Tribune puts it. Before 2017, around 20% of MPs employed a family member as an assistant, with no real checks and balances. This served to circumvent party financing limits or to "place" relatives. Fillon's legal fate — an investigation opened on the same day as the press article, extreme speed, constant communication with the left-wing media — is exceptional. This exceptionality decided the outcome of the 2017 presidential election, favoring the left-wing candidate Macron.
In 2022, Éric Zemmour, another figure on the "right," was convicted of inciting "racial hatred", tarnishing his campaign. These cases form a continuum: the form of a democracy is preserved, but the substance is corrupted by a politicized justice system that determines guilt -- but only on the "right."
II. France, a substantive dictatorship: the judge-legislator
Beyond appearances, the unlikely French dictatorship of the 21st century is embodied in its laws and regulations. Even when a right-wing or centre-right majority, with the cooperation of the centre-left, manages to pass a law that strikes at the totems of the left – egalitarianism, multiculturalism, punitive taxation, environmentalism, open borders, the sanctity of Islam – the guardians of the temple of the "never right" – the Constitutional Council and the Council of State – swiftly destroy it.
Such was the case with the recent immigration law of January 2024. Adopted under the leadership of a right-of-center Senate majority, this law tightened immigration quotas, restricted social assistance to foreigners and facilitated deportations. On January 25, 2024, the Constitutional Council struck down 35 of the 86 articles, 32 of them in their entirety were the additions made by the "right." Among the provisions struck down – in particular for procedural irregularities – were the most "controversial" ( to the "left") in the Senate: annual immigration quotas, abolishing or restricting the AME (free healthcare for undocumented migrants), tightening residence permits (for students, illness, family reunification), limiting social benefits, ending the abolition of personalized housing assistance (APL) and conditions for nationality. The result? A law stripped of its substance, preserving the multiculturalist and open borders dogma of the left.
On August 7, 2025, the Constitutional Council declared that Article 2 of the so-called Duplomb law, which aimed to facilitate, to a limited extent, the work of farmers, was unconstitutional. The Constitutional Council singled out, in particular, Article 1 of the Environmental Charter, which enshrines the right of everyone to "live in a healthy and balanced environment" -- which is actually a political program, not a right.
According to Jean-Eric Schoettl, former secretary general of the Constitutional Council:
"Tabled in November 2024 by 185 senators in response to the needs of French agriculture — and to the demands expressed by farmers in the spring of 2024 — the 'Duplomb-Ménonville' bill was adopted by a large majority in Parliament. Its aim was to 'remove constraints on the practice of farming' in accordance with European legislation, which is the most protective in the world."
Article 2 purported to introduce an extremely limited, restricted and monitored loosening of the ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, including acetamiprid. The Constitutional Council considered that the reintroduction of these substances – which are legal throughout Europe – was not sufficiently "regulated" in terms of conditions of use, duration or the nature of the sectors concerned. This decision was purely opportunistic, and therefore political, rather than a legal, judgement. Its main consequence, apart from emasculating the will of the parliament as well as the majority, is to euthanize industries in France while products treated with the same molecule are imported on a massive scale from abroad.
A revealing detail: the appeal to the Constitutional Council against the Duplomb law was lodged by far-left MPs from the France Unbowed party and the Communist Group (GDR). The same goes for the Council of State, the armed wing of the ruling caste, which rails every day against any initiative that in any way deviates from the dogmas and interests of the ruling caste and its "left-wing" values.
Philippe Fontana, a lawyer and essayist, denounced "the worrying drift in the Council of State's case law on migration," and explained that by approving public funding for associations that promote illegal migration to France, the Council of State is taking a moralizing stance that is legally nonsensical and diametrically opposed to the wishes and expectations of the overwhelming majority of French people: 70% of French people want a tougher immigration policy.
These court rulings form an impenetrable wall: an elected majority can vote, but the "wise" guardians of the left ensure that nothing passes that offends egalitarianism, environmentalism or the dogma of open borders.
Dictatorship in France
In France, sadly, democracy, has become nothing more than an illusion: the people vote, but the bureaucracy blocks the will of the voters. The end of this damning picture is a formal dictatorship through the removal of opponents, a substantive dictatorship through the obstruction of laws.
The new dictatorship appears based on a single ideology and the gradual suppression of freedoms and subverting the constitutional order in favor of a supposedly superior caste, whose contours, methods and appetites are reminiscent of what our American friends call the "deep state" – self-appointed bureaucrats running your life behind the scenes, where there is no transparency, accountability or readily available means to remove them.
Faced with this formal and substantive dictatorship, the French people are regaining their full natural and conventional rights — Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, August 26, 1789 — to resist oppression.
Will they make use of it? The history of the last two centuries indicates not without pressure. If they did, the ruling caste theoretically would repress their revolt with ferocity, thereby revealing the true nature of its hold.
Drieu Godefridi is a jurist (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain), philosopher (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain) and PhD in legal theory (Paris IV-Sorbonne). He is an entrepreneur, CEO of a European private education group and director of PAN Medias Group. He is the author of The Green Reich (2020).
