Before going further: a necessary clarification. This article is about political communications strategy, not about the legal merits of any case. Le Pen was convicted by an independent court and the conviction was upheld on appeal. Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts. Lula served 580 days in prison. The question being addressed here is not whether these prosecutions were justified. It is why, politically, they kept failing to do what their architects expected, and what that means for anyone who has to run against a candidate who frames every legal proceeding as a persecution.

The Martyr Mechanism: How It Actually Works



The most important thing to understand about the political martyr narrative is that it does not require the candidate to be innocent. It requires the candidate to be attacked, preferably publicly and dramatically, by an institution that a large share of the electorate already distrusts.

Trump understood this with near-perfect instincts. When the mugshot from his August 2023 Georgia booking was released, his campaign had merchandise on sale within two hours. The image, designed to humiliate, became the most effective fundraising asset of the entire cycle. The campaign raised $7.1 million in the days after the mugshot's release, with the highest-grossing single day of the entire campaign. When the hush money conviction came in May 2024, the campaign and Republican Party raised $52.8 million in the 24 hours after the guilty verdict, a sum that represented more than half of what they had raised in the entire month of April, with 30% of those donations coming from first-time contributors.

Each trial, each verdict, each court date, was reprocessed through the campaign's communications machine and sold as evidence of the same thesis: a corrupt establishment is afraid of this man, and their fear is your proof that he matters. The legal proceedings did not damage the narrative. They were the narrative.

Le Pen ran a version of the same playbook. Before the original March 2025 verdict, she held a "Stop the Steal"-style rally, saying "I will not let the French people have the presidential election stolen from them." When the conviction came, Orbán posted "Je suis Marine." Elon Musk rallied to her defence. Trump called it a "Witch Hunt." The international solidarity circuit lit up within hours. Le Pen suggested the National Rally would take inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership in the struggle for civil rights, a comparison so operationally useful, and so obviously disproportionate, that it generated a fresh wave of attention when the King family responded publicly.

None of this happened accidentally. It is a strategy with identifiable mechanics: frame the prosecution as political, recruit sympathetic voices to amplify, harvest the outrage as fundraising and engagement, and ensure that every opponent who focuses on the legal case inadvertently becomes the cast of the villains' story.

What the Opposition Did Wrong: Trump Edition



The Democrats' strategic error with the Trump trials was not that they supported the prosecutions. It was that they treated the prosecutions as campaign assets.

The implicit theory was: if voters see Trump convicted, they will not vote for him. This theory rested on the assumption that voters who were considering Trump had not yet made up their minds about his character. They had. The trials did not reveal anything to persuadable voters that they did not already know. What the trials did was energise Trump's base, generate record fundraising, and give him a daily media presence that no conventional campaign can buy.

Polling before the hush money trial found that 24% of Trump supporters said they "might reconsider" their support if he was convicted. "Might reconsider" is not "will change their vote," and most did not. Meanwhile, the relentless focus on legal proceedings crowded out exactly the territory where Democrats had genuine advantages: the cost of living, healthcare, and the concrete material conditions of voters who had not yet decided.

The opposition's communications instinct was to make the trials the story. Trump's communications instinct was to make the trials a fundraising opportunity and move on. One of those is a campaign strategy. The other is a legal brief.



What the Opposition Did Wrong: France Edition



The French case is more acute because the opposition arguably had more information available to them. The Trump template was visible, documented, and extensively analysed before Le Pen's trial ever began. And yet.

For sixteen months after the original conviction in March 2025, a significant portion of the French political debate was consumed by questions about whether Le Pen should be allowed to run, whether the ineligibility with immediate application was legally proportionate, whether Prime Minister Bayrou was right to express concern about it, and what it said about French democratic institutions. Every week that passed with the legal proceedings at the centre of the political conversation was a week that reinforced exactly the narrative Le Pen needed: that the establishment was mobilising every lever at its disposal to prevent her from competing.

The RN did not need to spend money on that framing. The opposition provided it for free.

Polling consistently put RN at between 31 and 36% in first-round projections, and pollsters noted: "Never, in my memory as a pollster, has the Rassemblement Nationale been measured at such a level at this stage of a presidential election." Those numbers were built during the period when the legal case was meant to be removing Le Pen from contention.

The opposition's second error was assuming that the conviction would stay in voters' minds as a reason not to vote for RN. Voters in countries with low institutional trust do not process a political conviction the way a civics textbook says they should. For a voter in a suburb of Lyon who has watched five presidents in ten years, who distrusts the media, who feels economically squeezed and culturally dismissed, a court convicting the politician they most want to vote for is not a reason to reconsider. It is confirmation that the system is rigged against people like them.

Talking about the conviction, repeatedly and loudly, tells that voter that you believe their judgment is wrong. It does not change their judgment. It embitters it.



The Lula Lesson: Prosecution Can Also Elevate the Innocent



The martyr mechanism is not exclusive to the guilty or the morally compromised. Lula da Silva is the other pole of the same dynamic, and it deserves attention.

In 2018, Lula began serving a 12-year prison sentence on corruption charges. His convictions were later annulled by Brazil's Supreme Court, which found serious procedural biases in the original case, including findings that the judge, Sergio Moro, had been politically motivated. Moro, in a detail that rather made the point, went on to become Bolsonaro's justice minister immediately after the election Lula had been barred from contesting.

Lula used that imprisonment not to retreat but to cultivate a specific identity: the working-class leader who had been jailed by elites to stop him from helping ordinary Brazilians. It was, given the subsequent findings about judicial bias, not entirely inaccurate framing. And it worked. He won the 2022 election and in his victory speech described himself as "someone who's been resurrected."

The lesson that Lula adds is that the martyr mechanism is not inherently a tool of bad actors. It is a structural feature of political prosecutions in high-trust-deficit environments. Whether the candidate is guilty or not, whether the prosecution is legitimate or not, the political dynamics are similar: if voters already distrust the institution doing the prosecuting, the prosecution strengthens, not weakens, the candidate it targets.

That is a deeply uncomfortable truth for democratic oppositions. But it is a truth.

What Can Backfire: The Limits of the Martyr Playbook



The martyr narrative is powerful. It is not invincible. And opposition campaigns that understand its limits are better placed to compete.

The first thing that can break it is a candidate who cannot control the story after the trial. Le Pen's playbook depends on maintaining the narrative of institutional persecution while simultaneously projecting governmental competence. The electronic ankle bracelet creates a tension between those two things. She previously said she would not run if required to wear the bracelet, saying "when you are a presidential candidate, you need to be completely free to move about," and then reversed that position within hours of the verdict. That reversal is now part of the story. Whether it becomes a liability depends on whether opponents focus on it wisely, not obsessively.

The second thing that can break the martyr narrative is a strong alternative candidate who makes the persecution story feel like yesterday's news. The RN has Jordan Bardella: 30 years old, 2.3 million TikTok followers, a working-class background from Seine-Saint-Denis, and no legal baggage whatsoever. Polls have consistently shown Bardella performing slightly better than Le Pen in second-round projections against rival candidates. The opposition's most dangerous scenario is not Le Pen, who brings all the polarising baggage of fifteen years of far-right frontrunnership. It is Bardella, who carries none of it and all of the momentum.

The third vulnerability in the martyr playbook is that it requires a perpetual sense of external threat to sustain. Once the threat resolves, or once the candidate is actually in power, the narrative loses its engine. Trump discovered this in the second term, where the "witch hunt" framing becomes harder to sustain when your opponent is not the justice system but the cost of eggs. Le Pen, if she wins in 2027, will face the same deflation. Governing is not persecuting. The opposition's job becomes much easier the moment the martyrdom ends and the governance begins.

What the French Opposition Should Actually Do Now



The answer is not silence about the conviction. Pretending a confirmed embezzlement ruling does not exist is neither honest nor credible. The answer is proportion and sequencing.

Acknowledge the conviction once, clearly, and move to the terrain where you have genuine advantages. Le Pen and Bardella's policies are the argument, not the trial. What does an RN government do to purchasing power? To healthcare? To France's position in Europe? To the cost of the energy transition? These are questions that the RN has detailed positions on, many of which are either economically incoherent or in direct tension with what a majority of French voters actually want once they are presented with the specifics.

That is the fight the opposition needs to have. Not "she was convicted" but "here is what she will actually do if she wins, and here is why it will not solve the problems she says it will."

The digital communications lesson is specific and uncomfortable. Stop using Le Pen's legal situation as organic social content. Every post, every tweet, every video that centres the trial or the conviction amplifies the persecution narrative to an audience that is not listening to the legal argument. It is reaching RN supporters and making them more motivated, and it is reaching undecided voters who already distrust the courts and confirming their priors. There is no meaningful audience that is being persuaded by it.

Put the content energy into the economic and social policy contrast. Make it concrete, visual, and personal. "This is what your pension looks like under their plan" travels further than "she was convicted of embezzlement" because it is about the voter, not about the candidate.

The Larger Pattern



The French situation is specific. But the pattern it belongs to is European, and growing. Viktor Orbán has built an entire political identity around the EU institutions allegedly persecuting Hungary. Matteo Salvini turned two corruption trials and an immigration prosecution into campaign assets so effective that they arguably saved his political career. The Israeli far right recycled Netanyahu's indictment into an argument that the judiciary was a left-wing conspiracy. In each case, the opposition doubled down on legal and institutional arguments. In each case, the candidate's support held or grew.

The common thread is not that these politicians are innocent, and not that the prosecutions are wrong. The common thread is that in societies where institutional trust has collapsed, legal proceedings against a politically popular figure are not processed as evidence of guilt. They are processed as evidence of elite hostility. And evidence of elite hostility, in the current political climate, is more likely to mobilise supporters than to deter them.

The opposition that finally figures out how to break this dynamic will not do it through the courts. It will do it by making the martyr story feel less important than the question of what actually happens to people's lives if the martyr wins.

That is a harder argument to make. It is also the only one that works.