What is the heart of democracy? Is it elections? The rule of law? Is it institutional processes that protect minorities from the rule of majorities?

The case of Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader who was recently found guilty of embezzlement, cuts to the heart of the question.

As part of her sentence, she has been barred from running for public office for 5 years, a time period which crucially would include the 2027 presidential election. In 2022 and 2017, she was one of two second-round candidates and would stand a very good chance of getting there again.

Should the electorate be able to decide entirely by themselves whether they regard the crimes of candidates as disqualifying? Or should the legal apparatus be able to constrain who runs for election, and who is forbidden?

Certainly Le Pen once thought it should be able to – back in 2013, she called for a lifetime ban on running for office on people who had embezzled public funds.

But the law is for other people. Jordan Bardella, the 29-year old heir presumptive to Le Pen’s position and current Rassemblement National (RN) president, called the judgement “disproportionate, political and partisan”. “French democracy,” he wrote, “has been executed”. Without evidence, he claimed that the purpose of the charges was directly to prevent Le Pen from running.

There are many other global examples of legal challenges to the right to stand in elections.

In 2017, Brazil’s Lula was convicted of money laundering and corruption – and disqualified from running for president in 2018. This let Jair Bolsonaro, the disastrous far-right leader, come to power and accelerate the deforestation of the Amazon. All this only for Lula’s cases to be quashed in 2021, with the supreme court finding serious bias in the case against him. He returned to power in 2023.

Pakistan’s Imran Khan has faced a slew of court cases – from misdeclaration of assets he was gifted to violating Islamic marriage law. He was disqualified from politics for 5 years in 2023.

In December 2024, the constitutional court of Romania cancelled elections in the country. The far-right candidate Călin Georgescu, who emerged suddenly as a frontrunner in the first round of the election, was accused of benefiting from a campaign organised by a “state actor” (presumably Russia). He was accused of “incitement to actions against the constitutional order”.

And, of course, there is the case of Donald Trump. He was convicted in May 2024 of falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case. This was not enough to disqualify him. Some had hoped that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment might have disqualified him, which prohibits people who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution from standing. The Supreme Court ruled in March 2024 that that would not apply. Trump has immunity from prosecution for “official acts”, although what counts is unclear.

So, why this spate of cases?

A deep crisis is metastasising through global capitalism. It is becoming increasingly difficult to form stable hegemonic blocs of voters in almost any major country. 2024 saw almost every electorate in the world turn against the incumbents. Candidates fight dirtier and more radical challengers arise. In this context, legal institutions become more important as constraints, often haphazardly or cynically imposed.

But it is not only the courts that have impinged on the core democratic process of elections. Liberal democracies are also integrated into other structures, such as markets, that can also tank governments and which set the playing field for elections.

David Adler, co-general coordinator of the Progressive International recently argued argued to me that way that Liz Truss was brought down – through a crisis triggered by her own disastrous mini-budget – should also alarm the left. Here, it was not judges that scuppered her project, but international financial markets. The same worries surrounded Corbynism and will be wielded against any future left project in the UK – will the markets rebel? That such an antidemocratic force would have such an oversized say in the politics of a country rubbishes the notion of democracy.

As Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Minister of Finance famously declared, “’elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy”. Apparently, for a medium sized country like Britain, this means even in the direction of disastrous rightwing policies like Truss’s.

So we have a tension, seemingly impossible to decisively solve from the perspective of liberal democracies, which rely on the balances of power between distinct wings of power, some explicitly stated in the constitutional order, others nominally separate from it, but immensely powerful over it.

What is to be done? In the French case, we can be concrete. Reacting to Le Pen’s banning, Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise (LFI) – the largest left group in the French Parliament – said “the decision to remove an elected official should be up to the people.” LFI referenced one of their most prominent constitutional demands: “a recall referendum […] in a democratic Sixth Republic.”

The Sixth Republic is a proposed restructuring of the constitutional system of France. Among other things, it would reduce the power of the presidency, enabling democratic accountability between the country’s half-decadal elections. This might mean that even if Jordan Bardella – a likely future presidential candidate for the RN – were to become the President of France, he would remain to some extent democratically accountable.

This would be, no doubt, a valuable reform. But it is far from the conclusion to this emerging crisis of liberal democracy.

The heterogeneity of these cases happening across the globe gives the left no easy, principled take on how to respond. It is not obvious that there is a simple way, in the real environment of politics, to sort the spurious and antidemocratic impingement of legal systems on democratic processes from the legitimate activities of essential democratic institutions.

There is, of course, a left take on exceptionalism: the ascent of fascist governments should be opposed by any means necessary. We may not like liberal democracy, but we will miss it when it’s gone.

But one thing is also clear: It’s a dangerous game for the left to offer blanket support to these processes. Not only because they can be used against us, but also because in some cases they give the right ammunition of their own to make the false claim that they are the true opposition to the Deep State: the nebulous collection of judges and bureaucrats and security services that constrain the electoral process.

The left’s project is a much more radical form of democracy: a form of autonomy and power exercised by people directly over their lives, from their participation in the economy to their associations with others, free not only from the restrictions of the liberal state’s decisions about who or what is a legitimate actor, but also from the rule of capital over it all.