Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 2.8% (17 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 14.2% (85 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 3.8% (23 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 0%
• Overconfidence Bias - 0%
• Framing Effect - 4.3% (26 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 3.8% (23 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 4.5% (27 hits)

Article text

Marine Le Pen comeback is a blow to Jordan Bardella

In the weeks leading up to her appeal hearing yesterday, Marine Le Pen spent most of her time clearing out her late father’s semi-derelict manor house overlooking West Paris.

Jean-Marie Le Pen had lived in — and ruled from — the same house for over half a century, leaving Marine and her two sisters with a messy and protracted clearout.

But it was nothing compared to the Byzantine ruling handed out by judges this week.

Though Le Pen has announced that she will once again run for the presidency, her hope to have last year’s five-year prison sentence and ineligibility verdict — for channeling European Parliament funds to her party in Paris — overturned has only been partly accomplished.

Le Pen is still considered guilty of embezzlement: there are numerous emails showing that National Front (as it was then known) staffers, including one of her sisters, were paid from funds intended to remunerate European Parliament assistants in Brussels.

However, the ruling also notes that she did not personally pocket a single euro.

Instead, her system worked to keep her perennially cash-poor party afloat after it had been debanked by high-street lenders for purely ideological reasons.

The distinction doesn’t exist in law, but it is capital in the mind of French voters.

Emmanuel Macron was told ahead of the hearings what the outcome would be, and mentioned it to a few visitors.

While he welcomes a situation in which the main threat to his political legacy is walking wounded, it would be a mistake to think he inspired it.

In France, as elsewhere, judges have been accused of Left-wing bias for decades, often with good reason.

They shied away from barring the most popular candidate from her fourth run, instead laying a series of IEDs on her way to the Élysée Palace.

Chief among those obstacles is Jordan Bardella — the slick, photogenic, 30-year-old National Rally president she herself set up as an alternative.

After last year’s verdict, the two held rallies together to re-energize the party base.

“We can vote for him because we know she’ll be behind him,” RN voters told UnHerd last year.

Jordy, as his enemies in the party call him, got used to the idea that he would become France’s president in 2027.

Two Catholic conservative billionaires, the media tycoon Vincent Bolloré and the tech entrepreneur Pierre-Édouard Stérin, took him up and delighted in finding him more ideologically malleable.

Le Pen, whose constituency is in Northern France’s rust belt, insists on a wider welfare state, lower pension age, and redistributive measures.

Not so Bardella, who supports free-market economics, less because he’s a Milei-style devotee of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman (he’s not much of a reader, even of his own books) but because he is eager to find support among French bosses.

At a lunch attended by several prominent business chiefs in Paris earlier this year, the two politicians openly disagreed on economic measures.

Le Pen is seen by many as the comeback kid, battered but unbowed, with the kind of human depth that can’t be faked.

Meanwhile, Bardella’s working-class appeal wasn’t helped by his appearance alongside his girlfriend, an Italian Bourbon princess, at the Monaco Grand Prix last month.

There, he was photographed with champagne glass in hand while, elsewhere in France, citizens protested against the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, Lyhanna, in South-Western France.

“There are White Marches every day,” Bardella was reported to have said.

Yet, of two limping candidates, it may be the gaffe-prone one who lucks out.