www.wakaticket.com –

default

In March last year, a Paris court found Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement and barred her from running in next year’s presidential race in France. The far-right figurehead took to the airwaves to slam a “political decision” and “denial of democracy”.

Le Pen, who has appealed, said she had been subjected to a “tyranny of judges” and a “political assassination”. The “system” had dropped “a nuclear bomb” on her. The presiding judge was then threatened by others on social media and her home address shared.

Six months later, the former rightwing president Nicolas Sarkozy was handed a five-year prison sentence for criminal conspiracy. He denounced a decision “of extreme gravity in regard to the rule of law and for people’s trust in the justice system”.

The court was motivated by a “hatred that truly knows no bounds”, Sarkozy added. The “injustice” it represented was “a scandal” and those who “hate me so much” were “humiliating France”, he said. France’s justice minister made a point of visiting him in prison.

A properly functioning, independent justice system is – as Liberties, a Europe-wide network of civil liberties NGOs, notes – “the cornerstone of the rule of law”, ensuring accountability, safeguarding people’s rights, and upholding fairness and equality.

The rule of law is the set of standards and principles that ensures no one in society – is above the law, and that everyone is treated equally, in accordance with the values of democracy and fundamental rights, and under the control of independent courts.

Defined more broadly, it should ensure that authorities use their powers and public resources for citizens’ good. That means, among other things, that people should be accurately and fairly informed by a free and plural media, and able to express their views through civil society organisations and by exercising their right to protest.

To make sure those standards are met, the rule of law requires governments to maintain independent, impartial institutions – including, most obviously, the judiciary.

On April 12th, Hungary will hold a general election in which Viktor Orbán risks defeat. For more than a decade, Orbán has shown how the rule of law can be degraded in a modern EU country.

He has packed the courts with judges loyal to him, and the media with editors happy to parrot his propaganda. He has tyrannised NGOs, and curbed LGBT and other human rights, creating what he has called an “illiberal democracy”.

He may be out next month, but the rule of law is increasingly under threat across Europe. In this series, Guardian correspondents look at the state of the rule of law in four major EU countries: what’s crumbling, and why it matters.

In Hungary, the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who next month faces an unprecedented challenge to his 16 years in power, has systematically eroded judicial independence through a string of constitutional and legal changes, packing the courts with loyalist judges and effectively capturing the justice system.

But even in countries with historically strong democratic reputations, independent justice systems are at risk. Political attacks – including on individual judges – are becoming increasingly common, dangerously undermining public confidence, Liberties said in its 2025 report.

In France, the body charged with maintaining magistrates’ independence has felt obliged to respond. It is “not acceptable in a democracy” for judges to be threatened or politicians to comment on individual prosecutions and sentences, said the Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature. The magistrates’ union has warned of an “assault on the entire justice system” and drawn comparisons with countries such as Hungary.

France – and most other European countries – has not, plainly, reached that stage yet. But when a hardline interior minister describes rule of law as “neither untouchable nor sacred”, and a justice minister rejects European court decisions, “we have passed a number of tipping points”, said one leading magistrate, Magali Lafourcade.

Civil liberties groups have other concerns about France’s justice system, including its true independence (prosecutors are appointed by the justice ministry), chronic underfunding, and the decades it can take to deliver justice.

Similar issues have long been a problem in other EU member states, too. But political attacks on this scale are a relatively new phenomenon in most, and an obvious cause for alarm if authoritarian far-right governments come to power – as in Italy.

Giorgia Meloni’s government has engaged in a veritable power struggle with Italy’s judiciary since its election in 2022. Among its first moves was to abolish the crime of abuse of office, a change pushed by the late former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Meloni’s administration has also limited the use of wiretapping. It frequently attacks the judiciary, slamming “politicised magistrates” trying to “abolish Italy’s borders” when the courts blocked her attempts to set up repatriation centres in Albania.

Targeted herself in an inquiry into the release and repatriation of a Libyan warlord wanted for war crimes by the international criminal court, Meloni dismissed the investigation as a leftist plot and said she was “not blackmailable, not intimidated”.

Attacks intensified before Italy’s recent referendum on a government-backed judicial reform aimed at separating the career paths of judges and prosecutors, establishing two governing councils selected by lottery and creating a disciplinary court.

Meloni’s government said the reforms were essential for impartiality, to weed out alleged leftwing judicial “factions”. Opponents said the reform was a highly partisan project that would weaken judges and prosecutors’ power and independence.

In the end, in a plebiscite that rapidly became a general verdict on her government and its record, Meloni lost – but many observers saw in her willingness to confront and “tame” Italy’s judiciary a tactic from Orbán’s playbook.

Even in countries with particularly robust judicial systems, such as Germany, pressures are mounting, observers say. Liberties has identified both lack of funding and far-right attempts to undermine judicial independence as requiring urgent attention.

An overburdened and underpaid judiciary, with looming staff shortages due to large numbers of judges approaching retirement, threatens to compound problems clearing the case load, with many proceedings already taking far too long.

At a regional level, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), well represented in many states and especially in the east, has blocked the reappointment of judicial officials in the state of Thuringia in an attempt to win concessions on other issues.

Concern has also focused on the “vulnerability” of Germany’s highest tribunal, the federal constitutional court, to attempts at manipulation, particularly by the AfD, although the Bundestag lower house has moved to address this. The then interior minister, Nancy Faeser, said the aim was to ensure “enemies of our democracy don’t have a gateway” to the judicial system. Autocrats “always turn first against the judiciary” and constitutional courts “are often their first targets”, she said.

To the east, meanwhile, Poland is finding out just how hard it is to reverse the controversial judicial reforms that brought it into conflict with the EU under the previous rule of the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party.

Inspired by Orbán’s “illiberal democracy”, PiS aggressively overhauled Poland’s justice system during its eight years in power, capturing the constitutional court and other institutions and radically expanding the role of justice minister.

Unwinding those changes has proved complicated for Donald Tusk’s government because the prime minister’s coalition does not have the necessary three-fifths majority to overturn a presidential veto, and only very limited progress has been made.

Much to its voters’ frustration, the Tusk government, elected in 2023, held off from taking action until the 2025 presidential elections, hoping its candidate would win – but Rafał Trzaskowski lost to a national-conservative rival backed by PiS, leaving the process effectively stalled.

Last November, the new president, Karol Nawrocki, refused to approve the appointment of 46 judges. Tusk’s former justice minister, Adam Bodnar, has spoken about the challenge of convincing people to focus on rule of law issues.

“Basically, a pretty significant part of the population didn’t see any big problem,” he said. “They were not concerned with institutions, the constitutional court, the judiciary … but more interested in, say, their social welfare situation.”

Struggling to change the legislative framework, the Polish government is instead focusing on “reckoning” with the previous government’s actions, with several senior PiS officials placed under investigation and facing charges for alleged abuses of power.

In particular, the architect of PiS’s judiciary reforms, Zbigniew Ziobro, is wanted by Polish authorities in relation to 26 separate charges – but he has claimed asylum in Hungary, and remains out of the reach of the Polish justice system.

Better, by far, than trying to unpick all this retrospectively was to be aware of the threat and act, said Lafourcade, who says she found herself in the crosshairs of transatlantic tensions last year when officials from the Trump administration sought to lobby her against an election ban for Le Pen.

“Look at the US right now, and ask if tomorrow we want an independent judiciary or not,” she said. “When a regime tips into the arbitrary and the authoritarian, it can happen fast.”