Trump’s felony convictions as seen from Europe

Trump’s felony convictions as seen from Europe

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS – Former US President Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts in a New York court comes just as attacks on the European anti-establishment, with anti-globalist positions similar to Trump’s, are ramping up to fever pitch ahead of parliamentary elections set for June 6-9, across all 27 member states of the European Union. An increasing number of media reports citing potentially significant populist gains that could set the tone for a very different Europe over the next five years – and the pushback is palpable.

On May 15 the populist Prime Minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, survived an attempted assassination. Court documents allege an objection to Fico’s policy of being tight-fisted with military aid to Ukraine, with investigators claiming that the assailant considered Fico “treacherous toward the European Union,” according to Bloomberg. Pro-establishment radicalization against the populist right has somehow managed to escape any debate or discussion in the wake of the incident.

French President Emmanuel Macron routinely treats right-wing populism as public enemy number one, dismissing populists as people who are afraid of a changing world – as though that’s a bad thing when he and his establishment pals have made a total mess of it lately. “More than ever, we have to choose the future of our continent because our Europe can die if it makes the wrong decisions,” Macron posted on the X platform at a Europe-related event in Dresden, Germany, earlier this month.

“Wrong decisions” like not re-electing establishment politicians, presumably.

Meanwhile, unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called for “pre-bunking” in the form of mind “vaccines” that favor establishment-approved narratives and information.

No doubt her forced “mind vaccinations” would target the right-wing populists whom she’s attempted to marginalize as“Putin’s proxies.”

It all smacks of desperation amid a perceived threat posed by the exercise of democracy. Anti-establishment dissent from both the right and the left has been on the rise, representing an estimated 32 percent of European votes, according to research from the University of Amsterdam published by The Guardian in September 2023.

Ask any European to cite the actual crime that Trump was found guilty of committing and they more than likely couldn’t say. And when you explain, as I have to folks here in France, that a hush payment to a porn star ended up getting caught up in some dodgy Trump campaign accounting, the reaction is usually just a wry smile and a comment along the lines of, “So, that’s it?” We’re talking about France, where shady campaign financing that ends up before the courts has been tied to coups, arms deals, and political assassinations.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy is heading to court on charges of passive corruption, criminal association, illegal financing of electoral campaigns and concealment of embezzled funds – of Libya.

Suspicions about Sarkozy’s motives for leading the regime change charge against the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, arose in 2012 when Libyan intelligence officials implicated French agents in the capture and killing of Gaddafi in October 2011, alleging a cover-up related to Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign.

Sarkozy has already been convicted on other illegal campaign financing charges and also for influence-peddling and attempted judge-bribing. Not like he’s done even a day in prison, though. Racking up these convictions has been about as consequential as punching a Starbucks loyalty card. There are so many of them at this point that it’s almost like he’s trying to beat some kind of unspoken high-score. But the competition is fierce.

Over a decade ago, former French President Jacques Chirac was found guilty of corruption for diverting public funds and abusing public trust when he was the mayor of Paris. He didn’t do any jail time, either, and eventually he passed away and basically just became a saint because he represented the good old days when France wasn’t blindly riding shotgun on Uncle Sam’s adventures.

Then there are the affaires d’état, like the Clearstream Affair, in which Sarkozy’s and former French Prime Minister Dominique De Villepin‘s camps stood accused of deploying useful idiots to do their dirty work against each other in the run-up to the 2007 presidential election. Only the useful idiots ended up getting convicted, though.

There’s also “Karachigate,” involving accusations of kickbacks from arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to fund yet another presidential campaign – that of then Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, in 1995. The middlemen, including Ziad Takkeidine, the French-Lebanese uncle of Hollywood star George Clooney’s wife, Amal, ended up getting convicted.

Onetime French p residential hopeful and former International Monetary Fund chief, Dominque Strauss-Kahn, was also arrested and charged with sexual assault and attempted rape of a worker at the Sofitel hotel in New York City, but never actually made it into the starting blocks for either the trial or the election. At the time, some considered the scandal a deliberate attempt to knock him off the electoral chessboard.

In politics, perception is reality. And Trump’s conviction over something seen as comparatively frivolous only fuels the impression among European populists of a borderless ideological contest that increasingly pits the average person against a global elite.