分类： politics

PARIS — As France approaches its 2027 presidential election, far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen has issued a stark ultimatum: she will withdraw from the presidential race if Paris’s appeals court upholds a controversial sentence requiring her to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet over the long-running EU funds misuse conviction. The court is scheduled to hand down its highly anticipated ruling this Tuesday, a decision that could reshape the entire landscape of French electoral politics. The 57-year-old far-right leader is currently appealing a March 2025 lower court verdict that found her and multiple other senior National Rally figures guilty of defrauding the European Parliament out of €2.9 million (roughly $3.4 million) between 2004 and 2016. Prosecutors alleged that the party misappropriated funds by hiring parliamentary aides who were actually working full-time for the National Rally rather than fulfilling official legislative duties. The lower court’s original conviction handed down a four-year prison sentence, a five-year ban from holding elected public office, and a two-year term of house arrest enforced by electronic monitoring. If the appeals court reaffirms the conviction, it has the power to uphold any combination of the original penalties, including a public office ban or the mandatory electronic bracelet. In an exclusive interview with French broadcaster LCI on Wednesday evening, Le Pen outlined her conditions for entering the 2027 race. “If I am able to stand as a candidate and campaign freely, I will run,” she stated. “But if I am formally permitted to candidate yet effectively barred from campaigning on my own terms, it simply would not be possible.” When pressed directly on whether a requirement to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet would disqualify her from running, Le Pen gave an unhesitating response. “Of course it would,” she said. “I cannot be reliant on a judge’s approval every time I want to hold a campaign rally, or visit a local market to meet voters. That is no way to run a national campaign.” Le Pen has repeatedly and categorically denied any wrongdoing, insisting she was never the mastermind of a fraudulent scheme to siphon EU public funds. Should the appeals court’s ruling bar her from candidacy, Le Pen confirmed she will pursue every legal avenue to challenge the decision, including an appeal to France’s highest judicial body, the Court of Cassation. That court does not reevaluate the facts of a case, but instead reviews lower court rulings to ensure procedural and legal compliance, a process that typically takes up to six months to reach a final verdict. French election authorities have scheduled the first round of the 2027 presidential election for April 18, with a runoff between the top two candidates set for May 2. Incumbent centrist President Emmanuel Macron is constitutionally barred from seeking a third consecutive term, opening the door for an open race to the Elysée Palace. Le Pen is currently ranked as one of the frontrunners to win the presidency if she is allowed to stand, with polling consistently placing her in the top two heading into the runoff. If she is forced to withdraw from the race, the National Rally’s standard-bearer will almost certainly be 30-year-old party president Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s handpicked protege and designated successor. Le Pen downplayed any talk of division between the two, framing their roles as complementary rather than competitive. “I have run for president three times before, so I am the natural candidate for our political camp,” she explained. “We bring different strengths to the table: I have decades of national political experience, while Jordan has an incredible dynamism and the energy that comes with his youth. We work very well together.” The outcome of Tuesday’s appeals court ruling is expected to send shockwaves across French politics, reshaping candidate strategies and shifting voter alignments ahead of one of the most consequential European elections of 2027. The case has also drawn renewed attention to long-running tensions between the European Union and euroskeptic far-right parties across the bloc, over allegations of misuse of EU institutional funds by nationalist political movements.

In a surprising twist of transatlantic politics, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated public attacks on Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have yielded an unintended outcome: the hard-right Italian leader has found a warm embrace from European leaders who once sidelined her over her party’s post-fascist ideological origins.

The rift between Trump and Meloni erupted after Trump questioned Italy’s reliability as a wartime alliance partner and falsely claimed Meloni had groveled for his personal attention during an international summit. The verbal assault immediately shifted long-standing tensions between Meloni and mainstream European leaders, who had kept her at arm’s length for years. Even as recently as early 2026, Paris and Berlin regularly excluded Meloni from closed-door small-group talks shaping Europe’s response to major global crises, amid disagreements over policy toward the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine — most notably her rejection of a British-French proposal to deploy European peacekeeping troops following a potential ceasefire. A key flashpoint earlier this year also came when Meloni refused U.S. bombers permission to use a Sicilian base for missions to the Middle East without parliamentary approval, a break from long-standing precedent that already strained U.S.-Italy ties.

But once Trump’s attacks escalated — including after Meloni called Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo “unacceptable” — European leaders quickly closed ranks around her. Many of the continent’s top leaders have themselves been targets of Trump’s biting public barbs, creating common ground. At a late June summit in Berlin, Meloni was formally included in talks alongside the leaders of Germany, France, Britain and Poland, marking her full entry into Europe’s core policy coordination circle. A day later, she held her first bilateral post-pandemic summit with French President Emmanuel Macron in southern France, cementing the new dynamic.

This shift extends far beyond Meloni and Italy, offering the latest clear example of how Trump’s consistently divisive approach to European politics is pushing the continent to deepen collective integration at a moment of unprecedented global strain. Facing concurrent crises — the ongoing war in Ukraine, escalating conflict in Iran, a ballooning trade imbalance with China, and persistent security threats from Russia — European mainstream leaders are increasingly prioritizing bloc-wide coordination on defense, trade tariffs, and foreign policy. This unity undermines Trump’s long-held strategy of negotiating with individual European nations bilaterally to split the continent, leaving him with far less leverage to advance his policy goals, according to analysts.

“Most of the mainstream leaders realize that Europe is getting squeezed between China and America, and so, if not now, then when?” said Sudha David-Wilp, vice president at the German Marshall Fund. “They need to act as a bloc in order to maintain Europe’s place in the world.”

Even Europe’s once pro-Trump nationalist political parties are recalibrating their stances, as Trump’s trade policies and the escalation of the Iran war grow deeply unpopular with domestic voters. In France, far-right leader Jordan Bardella — who once praised Trump’s nationalism as a “wind of freedom” — now lambastes U.S. actions as “foreign interference” and describes Trump as “erratic” and “extremely unsteady.” In Germany, far-right Alternative for Germany co-leader Tino Chrupalla, who once viewed Trump as a leader who would avoid new conflicts, said in March he was “extremely disappointed” by Trump’s military campaign against Iran.

These shifting political dynamics are playing out across the entire European continent, beyond the borders of the European Union. When Trump openly threatened to seize Greenland from Denmark, widespread protests broke out in both Nuuk and Copenhagen, with leaders across the Danish political spectrum condemning the move as a violation of European sovereignty that risks destabilizing the already strained NATO alliance. In Albania, a luxury real estate development linked to Trump’s family business has become a flashpoint for national political controversy, spurring large-scale protests in June. The political danger of close alignment with Trump was most clearly demonstrated in Hungary, where long-time Trump ally Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was voted out of office in April, despite open backing from Trump and prominent MAGA movement figures. A political analysis from risk consultancy Maplecroft concluded that widespread negative public perception of the Trump administration likely weighed heavily on Orbán’s electoral defeat.

For Meloni personally, the shift requires a careful balancing act. While she remains ideologically aligned with Trump on core issues including immigration and domestic security, she has long diverged from him on policy toward Ukraine, and her unwavering support for Kyiv has already helped repair trust with European allies. During her public spat with Trump last month, Meloni acknowledged that her personal friendship with him carries significant domestic political cost. In her response to Trump’s false claim that she “begged” for a photo with him at the G7 summit, she wrote on social media: “As for my popularity, being your friend has certainly not helped it, nor does it depend on my relationship with you.”

Data backs up that assessment: a recent Pew Research Center survey found that Trump is deeply unpopular across Italy, with 83% of Italians saying they have no confidence in Trump’s ability to handle international affairs correctly. His handling of issues ranging from the Iran war to transatlantic tariffs to U.S. immigration policy received overwhelmingly low approval from Italian respondents.

With Italian national elections scheduled no later than 2027, and potentially called as early as spring 2027, Meloni faces growing domestic pressure from fallout over the unpopular Iran war and her past ties to Trump. Lorenzo Castellani, a political analyst and professor at Rome’s LUISS University, noted that European voters often hold their own leaders accountable for actions of an American president that are outside their control. “At a certain point, when voters see the price of gasoline rising because of a war perceived as distant, they ask Meloni for the bill, not Trump,” he said.

This new push for European unity will face its first major public test next week, when NATO leaders gather for a long-scheduled summit in Turkey.

As the United States prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this Saturday, one long-time scholar is marking the occasion with a decades-long mission few have joined: reasserting the critical, underrecognized role of founding father John Dickinson, the statesman and lawyer most popularly remembered for refusing to sign the Declaration of Independence.

For 25 years, Jane Calvert, a former associate professor at the University of Kentucky and founder of the John Dickinson Writings Project, which works to digitize and widely disseminate Dickinson’s complete body of work, has waged a steady campaign to rewrite the pervasive misperceptions that have shrouded the founding father for generations. “It has been a constant struggle,” Calvert says of her work to restore Dickinson’s reputation.

A native of Maryland who built his public life across Delaware and Pennsylvania, Dickinson was once counted among the most influential and revered leaders of the Revolutionary generation. In the 1760s, his *Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania* — a collection of 12 incisive essays arguing against British Parliament’s claim to the right to levy taxes on the American colonies — was widely circulated across the 13 colonies, helping unify disparate colonists around a shared political identity and collective goal. He also penned the lyrics to *The Liberty Song*, one of the new nation’s earliest and most enduring patriotic anthems, earning him the nickname “the Penman of the Revolution” among his contemporary admirers.

Yet Dickinson clung to hopes for peaceful reconciliation with Britain long after the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord. In July 1775, he helped draft the Olive Branch Petition, a final appeal to King George III to avoid all-out war that the monarch ultimately rejected outright. When the Continental Congress cast its historic vote in favor of declaring independence in 1776, Dickinson and fellow Pennsylvania delegate Robert Morris abstained from the final vote. While Morris ultimately added his signature to the document, Dickinson chose to withhold his.

Contrary to popular framing of his choice as an act of disloyalty or opposition to independence itself, Calvert explains that Dickinson favored gradual, bloodless independence rather than immediate armed separation. He argued the young colonies were wildly unprepared for war: they lacked a standing army, a governing framework, established foreign alliances, and a domestic manufacturing base, and public opinion on independence was far from unified. Most pressing for Dickinson, Calvert says, was the absence of clear legal protections for America’s most vulnerable communities, particularly religious dissenters like the Quakers that formed a large community in his home state of Pennsylvania.

Despite his outsized early contributions to the independence movement, Dickinson’s reputation has been systematically diminished in mainstream historical and popular narratives, framed as a man of words too timid to commit to revolutionary action. At Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, his statue stands isolated in a corner of Signers’ Hall, cast in a pensive, detached pose. Mainstream storytellers of the American Revolution, from documentary filmmaker Ken Burns to *Hamilton* creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, have largely omitted Dickinson from their retellings. When he does appear, he is often misrepresented: in the 1969 musical *1776*, he is portrayed as a smug Anglophile, while the 2008 HBO miniseries *John Adams* casts him as a weak-willed compromiser to contrast with John Adams’ uncompromising, fiery commitment to independence.

Calvert argues these portrayals are far removed from the historical record. “It’s pretty egregious,” she says. “He is depicted as a scowling and sunken-eyed naysayer of the Patriot cause. We know that he was a compelling and charismatic figure, well-liked among his colleagues and seen as a devoted Patriot leader. He did not wear a wig, don fancy clothes, walk with a cane or speak with a Scottish brogue — all things added in popular media to make him appear aristocratic.”

After independence was formally declared, Dickinson never abandoned public service or aligned with British loyalists. He served in both the Pennsylvania and Delaware militias, led the drafting of the Articles of Confederation — the United States’ first governing framework after the Revolution — acted as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention where he supported the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, and held the office of president in both Delaware and Pennsylvania. Dickinson and his wife Mary also lent their name to Dickinson College, the first college chartered after U.S. independence, founded in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. When he died in 1808, then-President Thomas Jefferson eulogized him as “one of the great worthies of the revolution.”

Calvert’s advocacy has shifted some historical perspectives. Thomas Donnelly, lead scholar at the National Constitution Center, notes that Calvert’s work has deepened his own understanding of Dickinson’s contributions, speculating that the center’s isolated statue was intended to honor Dickinson’s thoughtful, scholarly approach to politics rather than sidelining him. Calvert herself argues that Dickinson deserves to be counted alongside the most celebrated founding fathers, including Adams and Jefferson, for his contributions before and after independence.

Not all historians agree with this top-tier ranking, even as they acknowledge Dickinson’s importance. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis, author of *Founding Brothers*, credits Dickinson as the leading voice of colonial resistance in the decade leading up to 1776, but argues his refusal to sign the Declaration remains a consequential mark on his legacy. Fellow Pulitzer winner Jack Rakove describes Dickinson’s 1776 position as “a quirk of his conscientious political personality” that should not overshadow his other achievements, but still places him in the second tier of founders, alongside figures like Benjamin Rush and John Jay. “Perhaps his qualms of conscience in 1776 have affected his reputation,” Rakove observes.

Dickinson himself recognized that his opposition to immediate independence had delivered a “finishing blow” to his “diminished popularity.” John Adams was among his most prominent contemporary detractors, dismissing him as a “piddling genius whose fame has been trumpeted so loudly.” By the 1840s, influential historian George Bancroft cemented his negative legacy, condemning Dickinson for how he “dulled the resentment of the people, and paralyzed the manly impulse of self-sacrificing courage,” Calvert notes.

Calvert is not alone in her defense of Dickinson. Other advocates include the late conservative commentator William Murchison, who drew on Calvert’s research for his 2013 Dickinson biography, as well as fellow historians and editors of the John Dickinson Writings Project, Ian Iverson and Nathan R. Kozuskanich. Unexpectedly, Calvert even counts the creators of the hit animated comedy *South Park* among the few popular storytellers who have portrayed Dickinson accurately. In a 2003 episode set amid the Iraq War, main character Eric Cartman travels back to 1776 to witness the independence debate, and frames Dickinson’s principled opposition to founding a nation through war as a parallel to contemporary anti-war protests. “It’s the only pop culture representation of Dickinson I’ve seen that portrays him as being motivated by principle — that we shouldn’t found a country based on war,” Calvert says. “Here Dickinson is the forefather of those antiwar protesters. Whether he would have gone so far as to say that the reasons for the Revolution were trumped up, I don’t know. Maybe. In any case, there is a lot to like!”

Just months after taking office in May, Guatemala’s new Attorney General Gabriel García Luna has announced a sweeping restructuring of the country’s public prosecution system, vowing to dismantle what he describes as the “repressive and vengeful” infrastructure left by his internationally sanctioned predecessor, Consuelo Porras.

Once viewed as a reliable U.S. partner in regional anti-corruption initiatives, Guatemala shifted dramatically away from transparency and accountability during Porras’ eight-year tenure. Porras, who has been sanctioned by the United States and multiple other nations for obstructing anti-corruption work, stands accused of systematically derailing public corruption investigations, persecuting independent justice officials, human rights activists and investigative journalists, and forcing hundreds of critics into exile. Most notably, she led an unsubstantiated effort to block the inauguration of President Bernardo Arévalo last year, claiming baseless election fraud to invalidate his win.

In an exclusive interview with the Associated Press, García Luna emphasized that the Public Prosecutor’s Office must脱离 its history as a tool for political retribution. “Everyone has a concept of a Public Prosecutor’s Office that can be used in a certain way, and we can no longer have that,” he said. “It is not a political entity, nor a political weapon for anyone, and I do not intend to repeat the actions taken in previous administrations.”

García Luna has already begun implementing his reform agenda, moving quickly to dismantle the network of loyalists Porras installed in key administrative and prosecutorial roles. These appointees were widely accused of leading the criminalization and harassment of former independent justice officials. He has also established a special review commission to re-examine hundreds of cases targeting people wrongfully prosecuted under the previous administration.

Porras has repeatedly denied all allegations against her, with her former office releasing a statement arguing that the claims violate her “right to honor, dignity, reputation and the presumption of innocence.”

Outlining the scale of the overhaul required, García Luna told reporters that Porras built a de facto parallel power structure within the prosecution service that gutted the profession. Over eight years, Porras dismissed between 800 and 1,000 qualified career prosecutors and staff, triggering a mass exodus of experienced personnel that left the institution severely weakened. García Luna’s agenda includes not only reversing these personnel changes but also rooting out systemic abuses from the previous era and rebuilding the depleted prosecutorial workforce.

When asked about potential legal repercussions for Porras, García Luna did not rule out future charges. Porras currently faces multiple formal complaints, including allegations of involvement in human trafficking linked to irregular international adoptions. The new attorney general also confirmed that his office is reviewing and reopening all cases in which Porras’ administration allegedly granted impunity to corrupt officials, drug traffickers and other criminal suspects, with legal action moving forward to hold accountable anyone who benefited from the previous system.

Many advocates and exiled justice leaders are calling for a full, independent probe of Porras and her inner circle. Juan Francisco Sandoval, a former top anti-corruption prosecutor who fled into exile after being targeted for his work on high-profile graft cases, stressed that allegations against the former administration cannot be left unaddressed. “These should not go unresolved, in accordance with the principle of equality before the law and the principle that no one should be above the law,” Sandoval said.

García Luna’s reform push has already garnered broad international backing. The U.S. government and European Union member states have publicly committed to supporting his efforts to combat transnational criminal networks, including drug trafficking and human trafficking rings. Guatemala’s Attorney General’s Office is also partnering with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which has scheduled a public hearing on August 4 to examine claims of political persecution under Porras’ tenure.

For more coverage of Latin American politics and governance, visit AP’s dedicated regional hub at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america.