U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance used the shocking “lawfare” against France’s leading presidential hopeful, Marine Le Pen, to again chastise the European Union. Interviewed on Newsmax by Rob Schmitt on April 3, Vance: “We have to appreciate that the greatest threat to Europe is not China or Russia. The greatest threat to Europe is from within.” While he cited “economic policies that make them less competitive” and “migration policies that destroy the fundamental cultural bedrock of Europe,” he also returned to the undemocratic targeting of the political opposition. “The rhetoric in Europe just doesn’t match the reality. And they start trying to throw presidential candidates and political leaders off the ballot.”
At the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14, he had famously cited the EU’s outrageous cancelling of Romania’s presidential election when EU leaders in Brussels disapproved who the winner was. Now, Vance underlined the EU’s addiction to running roughshod over their own populations, given the treatment of Marine Le Pen who heads France’s Rassemblement National (RN), saying that she is “leading in some polls and [this is] over an incredibly minor charge that implicates, by the way, her staff, not even Marine Le Pen herself. They’re trying to throw her in prison and throw her off the ballot. Look, that’s not democracy.”
