"Saving Democracy" By Prosecuting Political Adversaries: A Roundup

Here in the U.S., with few exceptions, we have a commendable tradition that victorious politicians do not use the criminal justice system to prosecute or otherwise disable their rivals and adversaries. At the presidential level, before Trump the two most prominent examples against that tradition were the prosecution of Aaron Burr by Thomas Jefferson in 1807, and the prosecution of Eugene Debs by Woodrow Wilson in 1918. Otherwise, our defeated presidential candidates have gone peacefully to retirement.

But then, after Trump was defeated in 2020, that tradition was abrogated in rather spectacular fashion. At both the federal and state levels, prosecutors associated with the Democratic Party unleashed an unprecedented multi-barreled lawfare barrage, both criminal and civil, against the defeated adversary: the Justice Department (Jack Smith) prosecution for alleged “obstruction of justice”; the separate Justice Department (also Jack Smith) prosecution for alleged mishandling of classified documents; the New York State (Alvin Bragg) prosecution for for some 35 felonies, all involving alleged mis-recording of blackmail payments as a “legal expense” in books and records of a private company; the separate New York State (Letitia James) civil case seeking to bankrupt Trump with hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties for allegedly over-valuing his properties on personal financial statements.

Notable about all the Trump prosecutions is how completely flimsy were all the charges against him. The idea was rather transparently to use control of levers of government power to disable the main adversary in the political arena. Meanwhile, the people involved sanctimoniously wrapped themselves in a claim that they were “saving our democracy.”

If you don’t keep track of international news, you may not realize the extent to which such efforts to use prosecutions, lawfare and courts to take out political adversaries are common in the world. It’s worse in the third-world countries, but the seemingly sophisticated wealthy countries of Europe are by no means immune. There are many more cases than I can cover here, but I thought a small roundup would be useful to illustrate some other places where such tactics have been used.

France

In the last two presidential elections in France (2017 and 2022), the candidate of the National Rally party, Marine Le Pen, made it into the two-candidate run-off final round, and then finished second to Emanuel Macron. The next presidential election will occur in spring 2027, and this time Le Pen is leading in the polls. Le Pen and her party have as their main issue the imposing of severe restrictions on open immigration. As a result, they are anathema to the Left.

From about 2015 on, Le Pen came under investigation by the French judiciary for alleged embezzlement of European Union funds. The allegation was basically that she took funds allocated by the EU to members of its parliament to pay their staff (Le Pen was a member from 2004-17) and used those funds for politicking in France. The charges were not instigated by the Macron government, but rather apparently by EU bureaucrats and the French judiciary, both notably left-leaning. In March 2025 Le Pen was convicted at trial and sentenced to a four year prison term (mostly suspended), a fine, and a five-year suspension from running for office. This would have taken her out of the 2027 presidential race.

In July 2026 the Paris Court of Appeal affirmed the conviction, but deleted the part of the sentence that disabled Le Pen from running in the upcoming election. So she appears to be re-instated, at least for now.

Romania

In December 2024, Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the results of the first round of a presidential election, and canceled the second round. The first round had apparently been won by Calin Georgescu, universally characterized in the press as “hard right.” Among his other positions, Georgescu is known as a “nationalist,” and as a critic of Ukraine and of NATO. In March 2025 a Romanian Electoral Commission disqualified Georgescu from participating in the re-scheduled election. In May 2025 a new election was held, and the winner was Nicusor Dan, characterized as a “centrist,” over an opponent, Simion, who was allied with Georgescu.

What were the grounds for annulling the first election? Here is a Report from something called the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. Key quote:

Romanian intelligence services declassified documents outlining concerns about cyber activities by state and non-state actors, the use of digital technologies, and information campaigns that may have undermined the election's integrity. These documents underscored the dual nature of new technologies in elections and their manipulation by malign actors. . . .

The main alleged “malign actor” involved was Russia. The court did not hold any trial, and issued its decision annulling the election within a few days after the intelligence services released their declassified documents. In other words, it appears that the court basically took the word of the intelligence services as to alleged “election interference.” Any resemblance to the “Russia collusion” hoax perpetrated by the U.S. intelligence services may be completely coincidental. Anyway, in the second election held in May 2025, the judiciary got their preferred pro-EU “centrist,” and suddenly there was no annulment of the result.

Brazil

On October 25, “Lula” da Silva was declared the apparent winner of Brazil’s latest presidential election. The next day, October 26, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, ordered confiscation of the passport of the losing candidate, Flavio Bolsonaro, in anticipation of prosecution for crimes as yet unspecified. Bolsonaro promptly fled the country before he could be arrested. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s father Jair, the losing candidate in the previous election four years ago, is under “house arrest” in Brazil on a 27-year sentence. A statute passed by the Brazilian Congress earlier that would have greatly shortened the sentence has been “suspended” by the Supreme Court pending full constitutional review.

The Wall Street Journal had an editorial on October 28 about the situation. Key quote:

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a Lula ally, signed off on a federal police request to seize Mr. Bolsonaro’s travel documents. . . . Mr. Bolsonaro hasn’t been charged with a crime. But he has good reason to believe that he can’t get a fair trial if he is. Lula said at a campaign debate that as soon as Mr. Bolsonaro no longer had congressional immunity, he’d face all manner of investigations. Lula chose the man and promised to find the crime. The job of deciding whether a criminal prosecution of a federal politician is warranted belongs to the attorney general. But Justice de Moraes has made a practice of expanding his jurisdiction when it suits his political aims.

Here is a picture of de Moraes:

And these examples are without getting to some of the really authoritarian countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, where political adversaries of the regime just disappear into a prison somewhere, never to be heard from again.

Meanwhile, there have been several recent electoral victories in South America by the political right. At least a few of those have not been followed by notable instances of prosecution of the defeated adversaries. Two examples of that are Colombia and Chile.

But not all the recent right-wing victors are clean on this score. Instances of arrests of high-ranking political adversaries by new right-wing leaders have occurred in both Bolivia and Ecuador. At least in Bolivia, the charges appear serious and legitimate (e.g., former president Luis Arce is charged with embezzlement of $700 million from the government-funded Peasant Development Fund). However, based only on a few translated articles, and without knowing the applicable laws, I am not able to do an independent evaluation of the seriousness of these cases.

It is next to impossible to operate a democracy where the consequence of defeat is prosecution and imprisonment at the hands of the victor. In the U.S., we have had two centuries with almost none of that. Now that seems to be slipping away. Once it’s gone, I don’t know how we get it back. We could end up no better than all these third-rate countries.