From victim to villain: Enemization, justice, and the democratic debate in the framing of Marine Le Pen’s condemnation

Abstract

This article examines how the March 2025 conviction of Marine Le Pen for the misuse of European Parliament funds was framed in the French press and how the event became a discursive site for negotiating democratic legitimacy and political enmity. The ruling generated extensive media coverage that combined legal reporting with political interpretation. Drawing on a corpus of 45 articles from eight national and regional French newspapers collected through the Europresse database, the study combines textual data analysis with concordance analysis using Hyperbase. The analysis reveals a significant contestation of institutional vocabulary. Terms such as justice, (État de) droit, démocratie, and République shift between functional uses that describe legal procedures and evaluative uses that moralize the political conflict. This resemanticization of institutional language becomes particularly visible in the opposition between narratives advanced by Le Pen and her supporters—who portray the conviction as political persecution and a threat to democratic choice—and those of political opponents and commentators who frame the ruling as the defence of the rule of law. In this discursive confrontation, institutional terms become tools for legitimizing or delegitimizing political actors, allowing forms of political enmity to emerge indirectly through the moral framing of democratic principles.