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There is a particular smile a politician wears when an institution comes for them. Not fear. Relief. Because the moment a court, a regulator, or the European Commission moves to sanction them, the story writes itself — and they are the hero of it.
Marine Le Pen wore that smile on 31 March 2025. A Paris court convicted her of embezzling European Parliament funds, fined her €100,000, and — the part that mattered — banned her from public office for five years, effective immediately. On paper, it ended her 2027 presidential bid before it began. Within hours she had reframed it: not a verdict, a “political decision.” “The rule of law,” she said, “has been totally violated.” The woman found guilty of misusing public money had become, in her own telling, the victim of a system rigged to silence her.
On 7 July, the Paris Court of Appeal rules on whether that conviction stands. Whatever the judges decide, Le Pen has already won the framing. Uphold it, and she is a martyr barred from an election she might have won. Overturn it, and she is vindicated, the persecution exposed. There is no verdict that hurts her narrative. That is the tell. When every possible outcome strengthens you, you are no longer being punished. You are being promoted.
Strip away the politics and the move is almost mechanical. It works in three steps.
First, provoke — say the thing that invites sanction. Second, get sanctioned — by an institution with enough authority to make the punishment look serious. Third, and this is the alchemy, convert the punishment into proof. The sanction stops being about what you did and becomes evidence of what you are: too dangerous to the establishment to be left alone.
The genius of it is that it reverses the burden. Normally, a public figure has to prove they matter. The martyr play outsources that proof to the institution doing the punishing. A court doesn’t ban a nobody. A bank doesn’t close a harmless man’s account. An intelligence service doesn’t classify a fringe party as a threat unless — the logic goes — it is winning. The punishment becomes the endorsement.
And it does something to the audience that ordinary campaigning cannot buy. Diffuse sympathy hardens into tribal loyalty. A supporter who merely agreed with you now feels attacked alongside you. The in-group tightens, the identity sharpens, and every subsequent attack lands as an attack on them. You have converted voters into a congregation.
Europe learned this from the celebrity culture-war, where the mechanism was first perfected and where the stakes were only money and status.
J.K. Rowling did not shrink after years of backlash over her comments on gender; her profile grew, and the fury of her opponents became the mortar of a hardened fan identity around her. Dave Chappelle turned protests over his specials into sold-out tours — the outrage was the advertising. Donald Trump built an entire political identity on the claim that the system is out to destroy him, and every indictment, every attempt to delegitimise him, folded neatly into the story his base already believed. Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Mel Gibson, James Gunn — the comeback arc has become so reliable it is nearly a genre. Scandal, exile, triumphant return, the return itself narrated as proof that “they” could not keep the hero down.
The pattern holds because it feeds on a real thing: audiences distrust institutions, and a figure the institutions punish inherits that distrust as fuel. But note what the celebrity version costs when it fails — a few flopped films, a quiet couple of years. The European political version plays for something else entirely.
Here, the “canceller” is not a Twitter mob or a streaming platform. It is the state, the courts, the banks, and Brussels. And the prize is not a Netflix special. It is power.
Take Nigel Farage. In June 2023, Coutts closed his bank account. Internal documents later showed the bank’s risk committee had discussed his politics, calling him “pandering to racists” — a private institution quietly deciding a public figure was too toxic to serve. For Farage it was a gift wrapped in pinstripe. He turned a personal grievance into a national cause about “debanking,” forced the resignation of NatWest’s chief executive, extracted an apology and a settlement, and emerged as the man the establishment tried to erase. Reform UK gained more than 600 council seats this May. The account closure did not slow him. It anointed him.
Or Romania, where the strategy reached its logical extreme. Cälin Georgescu, a pro-Russian outsider, won the first round of the November 2024 presidential election. Days before the run-off, the Constitutional Court annulled the entire vote, citing evidence of Russian interference, and later barred him from the re-run. Georgescu called it a “formalised coup d’état.” Tens of thousands marched. Whatever the genuine merits of the court’s alarm about foreign manipulation — and they may be real — the optics were catastrophic: the establishment had literally cancelled an election the wrong man was winning. You could not design a more perfect martyrdom in a laboratory.
Germany offers the cleanest case of all. In May 2025, the domestic intelligence service, the BfV, formally classified the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation — the state officially naming the party a threat to the constitution. Nearly half of Germans told pollsters they would support banning it. And the AfD? Second place in the February Bundestag election, more than a fifth of the vote. Every attempt to wall it off — the Brandmauer, the extremist label, the ban chatter — arrives to its voters as confirmation of the party’s central claim: that a frightened establishment is conspiring to deny them a voice.
Here is the part the strategy’s admirers leave out. It mobilises a base beautifully. It wins a majority almost never.
The proof is Viktor Orbán. No European politician ran the “Brussels wants to silence us” playbook longer or more skilfully. For over a decade, every rule-of-law procedure, every frozen fund, every European Parliament resolution was recast at home as an attack on Hungarian sovereignty by foreign elites. It was the martyr strategy as a permanent operating system. And in April 2026, after sixteen years in power, he lost — to Péter Magyar’s Tisza, a challenger who refused to play the victim and simply offered competence instead. The persecution narrative energised the faithful right up to the day it ran out of new people to convince.
Farage shows the same ceiling from the other side. Reform surges in seats, yet Farage’s personal favourability sits at minus forty — roughly two-thirds of Britons view him unfavourably. The martyr play builds a fortress. It does not build a cathedral. It deepens the loyalty of those already inside and hardens the hostility of everyone else, which is a fine formula for a passionate quarter of the electorate and a terrible one for fifty percent plus one.
The uncomfortable truth for Europe’s institutions is that they are being played, and pretending otherwise will not help.
Some of these sanctions are entirely legitimate. Embezzlement is embezzlement, whoever signs the invoices. Intelligence services are right to watch parties that flirt with the constitution’s edges. Courts should worry about foreign money in elections. The problem is that the martyr strategy is designed precisely to launder accountability into persecution — to make a fraud conviction indistinguishable, in the public eye, from a political hit. And every time an institution acts clumsily, secretively, or on a timeline that looks convenient, it hands the laundering operation its raw material.
So the question is not whether to enforce the rules. It is how to enforce them without writing the martyr’s next campaign ad. That means transparency over back-room risk committees, proportionality over bans that look like panic, and above all patience — because the one thing the strategy cannot survive is boredom. Georgescu barred is a hero. Georgescu ignored, out-argued, and beaten at the ballot box is just a man who lost. Orbán proved the antidote exists: you do not out-shout the martyr. You out-govern him.
For the rest of us, the lesson is simpler. When a public figure seems to want the punishment — when they smile as the institution closes in — believe them. “Please cancel me” is not a cry for mercy. It is a business plan. And the surest way to refuse it is to stop treating the sanctioned as either saints or demons, and start asking the boring, decisive question the martyr most wants you to skip: never mind who is persecuting them — are they actually any good at the job?
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