Lawfare around the globe is a threat to democracy

Doubts about Qatargate are a reminder that liberal establishments are using courts to delegitimize opponents in France and Israel, just as they did in the United States against Trump

Jonathan S. Tobin 

Photo by Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP via Getty Images

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had enough on his plate leading a country at war, a fractious governing coalition and coping with the distraction of a trial on corruption charges that has been going on for a staggering five years with no end in sight. Now he’s got another problem to deal with.

“Qatargate” is the latest addition to the list of issues facing Netanyahu. The scandal is based on the claim that two people who worked in the prime minister’s office were in “contact with a foreign agent” as well as engaged in “money laundering, bribery, fraud and breach of trust.”

That’s a shocking accusation, especially the part about his advisers allegedly being in cahoots with Qatar, a nation that is allied with Iran and Hamas, as well as a leading funder of Islamist fundamentalist schools and mosques around the world.

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But if Netanyahu’s supporters smell a rat, it’s not because they suspect the accused of being traitors. On the contrary, both the prime minister and many of his backers see this as just another dishonest attempt on the part of his opponents to use the legal system to discredit or topple him.

Moreover, they are not alone in thinking this way about the rash of similar efforts to take down the leaders of right-wing and populist political parties among the world’s democracies by non-democratic means.

Qatargate is being analogized to the Russia collusion hoax that plagued President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2019; the attempt to impeach him over his threats to cut off aid to Ukraine; and the efforts to jail and/or bankrupt him during the four years between his first and second terms.

Nor is this phenomenon confined to the United States and Israel.

Lawfare in France

This week, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing Rassemblement National Party (RN) and the frontrunner in the 2027 French presidential race, was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to prison. Yet rather than being accused of stealing money for personal gain, the indictment hinged on a technicality and a complicated chain of events concerning whether RN staffers who work for its representatives should have been paid by the European Parliament or by the party in France.

It’s far from clear that the RN’s conduct was very different from what other French parties do or anything that should have been labeled as embezzlement. It was, instead, widely perceived as an attempt by the French political and legal establishment to prevent Le Pen from running for president. The fact that the sentence handed down involved a five-year ban on running for office, coupled with the judge’s insistence that this part of his ruling be immediately enforced rather than only after appeals have been exhausted, made it appear even more partisan.

As far as the RN is concerned, what has happened to Le Pen is no different from the lawfare that was waged against Trump in the United States.

Last year, France’s leading neo-liberal centrist and far-left parties came together to deny RN control of the French parliament, despite the fact that they won the most votes and seats. Those factions have, under various parties, alternated in control over the French Republic for the last 70 years. And they have no intention of letting the upstart RN ascend to power.

The RN was founded by Marine’s antisemitic father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and had more than a tinge of Vichy France fascism about it. Under his daughter, however, it has undergone a transformation. Following Marine Le Pen’s succeeding her father as its leader in 2011, it shed his racist point of view and expelled the elder Le Pen in 2015 (he died in January of this year).

It is now a vocal opponent of the spirit of antisemitism that is so much a part of contemporary French life. Jew-hatred in France is, as is the case elsewhere in Europe, driven by a red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists. RN is against the mass immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, especially from former French possessions where Islam is a dominant force, which has enabled that troubling development.

Many French Jews are still reluctant to make common cause with the RN because of its past, as well as the historical association of the French right with antisemitism dating back to the Dreyfus Affair in 1894. But in what can be considered both a historic irony as well as a sign of the changing times, RN has become a crucial defender of the embattled Jewish community. It’s also a stalwart supporter of Israel in a country where the traditional hierarchy is either lukewarm at best or openly hostile to the Jewish state.

But what just happened in France is a theme playing out all across Europe, where a similar reaction to the way mass immigration has enabled what could be called the Islamization of societies and the marginalization of existing national cultures. In some places, like Hungary, the Netherlands and Italy, right-wing populist parties have ascended to government. Elsewhere, their opponents—whether traditional liberals, centrists or leftists—have done their best to anathematize them.

In Germany, that’s been made easier by the right-wing AfD Party’s failure to purge the ranks of their parliamentary candidates of those who evince nostalgia for their country’s Nazi past. But, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance pointed out in a seminal speech to the Munich Security Conference in February, the reason for the AfD’s rise is because they are speaking out in defense of national borders and against the impact of mass immigration enabled by both the traditional left and right.

Vance’s democracy lesson

The same point applies to Romania, where a right-wing party won the country’s national elections. Rather than accept the verdict of democracy, that victory was invalidated by the Central Election Bureau, which then denied its leader, Călin Georgescu, the right to run in the do-over balloting. That body gave no rationale for this anti-democratic decision, but it came two weeks after Georgescu’s political opponents, who were angry about his sympathy for Russia and hostility to Ukraine, had orchestrated his indictment for “incitement to actions against the constitutional order”; the “communication of false information”; and involvement in the establishment of an organization “with a fascist, racist or xenophobic character.”

One needn’t be sympathetic to Georgescu or Le Pen—or any of the other nationalist and populist parties in Europe that have come to the fore because of the impact of mass immigration—to understand two things.

One is that the accusation that the electoral success of contemporary right-wing political parties is a rerun of the Nazi rise to power in the 1920s and ’30s is tone deaf to the realities of the 21st century. Today, it is the left and their Islamist allies that are the primary source of European antisemitism.

The other is that the lawfare being employed in France and Romania is antithetical to democratic norms.

That was the point Vance made in Munich when he said: “We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.” He went on to note that during the Cold War, it was the forces of an evil Soviet empire that “censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections.” Sadly, he accurately noted that in 2025, the winners of the Cold War—the nations that were the self-described members and leaders of the “free world”—were acting in that manner.

That wasn’t something the gathering of foreign- and defense-policy elites from Europe and North America wanted to hear.

Characterizing lawfare against political opponents as a triumph of “the rule of law,” as liberal commentators in Europe and America have done, requires observers to ignore the obviously partisan nature of these cases. At stake here is not the efforts of a “reactionary international,” as French President Emmanuel Macron put it, threatening the independence of the courts. What we are witnessing is a dying establishment seeking to defend its power by any means necessary, even if it means traducing the basic principles of democracy.

Banana republic tactics

It may be, as The New York Times claimed, that the Romanian fiasco was a “propaganda coup” for Russia. But that’s only because what the authorities did there, as well as months later in France, unfortunately validated the claims of Moscow’s authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin, that those in the West who oppose his tyranny at home and aggression against Ukraine are hypocrites when it comes to their supposed defense of democracy.

As Vance said, if Americans and Europeans want to stand up for democracy, they have to stop behaving like they are running banana republics by engaging in censorship of dissent and trying to jail their political foes, corrupt practices that the Biden administration also engaged in.

As Netanyahu has said, the same problem of a “deep state” that seeks to defeat political forces that oppose the liberal establishment by fair means or foul exists in Israel. He is in power by virtue of winning a clear majority in a democratic election. And despite everything that has happened since his victory in November 2022, including both the paralysis of the Jewish state by opponents of his judicial reform proposals and the catastrophe of Oct. 7, 2023, he has an even chance of extending his already record term of office when the country goes back to the polls, likely sometime in 2026.

And that is the context in which Qatargate must be understood.

The war on Netanyahu

At this stage, with little of the evidence of the alleged misconduct of Netanyahu’s staff being made public, it’s hard to know what to think about these charges. Most people act on the assumption that where there is smoke, there is fire—and that prosecutors and police, as well as the judicial system, can be trusted to get to the truth. Given the seriousness of these accusations, a wait-and-see approach to the issue seems prudent.

Yet even if we are inclined to give the investigators the benefit of the doubt, the notion that Netanyahu’s advisers were actually agents of Qatar seems, on its face, preposterous.

More to the point, there is a sense of déjà vu among many Israelis about all of this.

In 2016, when the investigation of Netanyahu on the charges on which he is still standing trial began, many observers assumed that at least some of the accusations being lodged against the prime minister were legitimate. Or rather, they assumed that they had to be since those making them had jobs in the legal system that normally inspire trust.

But once the investigation unfolded and the nature of the four separate cases that were brought against him was made plain, that assumption proved unfounded. The charges were so flimsy and clearly so partisan in nature that the only people who really treated them as legitimate were those whose hatred for Netanyahu was so great that they’d believe any accusation lodged against him.

There is a long tradition of Israel’s liberal establishment seeking to delegitimize the political right, dating back to the pre-state era. In recent years, that impulse to view the right as beyond the pale has taken on an even more desperate character. That’s a product of the way demography and the implosion of the once-dominant left-wing Labor Party over its catastrophic “land for peace” policies have led to the increasing electoral success of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and its various religious and right-wing allies.

The Israeli left has used its stranglehold on a self-perpetuating majority on the country’s Supreme Court that seeks to dominate the country’s government, rather than merely act as a check on it as it does in other democracies, to hamstring Netanyahu. The determination of the country’s liberal elites to falsely demonize Netanyahu as a would-be authoritarian because of his efforts to reform the judiciary is not unlike the Democratic Party’s similarly disingenuous approach to Trump.

From Russia collusion to Qatar

This is why Netanyahu’s pushback against Qatargate and the other efforts to take him down should resonate for Americans who saw how the justice system in the United States was weaponized against Trump.

It is theoretically possible that Qatargate will, unlike Russia collusion, prove to be a real scandal as opposed to a partisan conspiracy theory. But the way the corruption cases against Netanyahu have imploded during the endless trial about them and the open animus that the legal establishment has for the prime minister, skepticism about such a scenario is far from unreasonable.

At this point, the claim that these efforts to take down populist or right-wing political leaders are solely about upholding the rule of law is risible. The political left—whether in the United States, Europe and Israel—is not so much interested in debating its opponents as they are in delegitimizing them. Asserting that any other point of view but one’s own is inherently undemocratic is the standard argument of tyrants, not the advocates for political freedom.

Democracy is in peril in 2025. But as Vance rightly argued, the main threat to it now comes from the practitioners of lawfare, who are the loudest in claiming to be its defenders.

Jonathan S. Tobin, editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, 3-4-2025

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