Gideon Spevak:
A trend has been forming within Western democratic institutions, one that contradicts the democratic ideal of such bodies: Elected officials face censure and being stripped of their rights (and obligations) as members of elected bodies to represent their constituents — at the hands of their fellow members, with whom they often find ideological differences.
In May 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 7-2 ruling (Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting) ordered that the Maine legislature temporarily restore the right to vote in in the House to Laurel Libby, a Republican state legislator, after she was censured and barred from voting by the legislature for a social media post criticizing the presence of male transgender athletes in female sporting events. (Libby’s post showed a transgender male athlete participating in a female pole-vaulting event, next to a photo of him participating in the male event the previous year.)
This effort to bar officials whose views go against the grain from voting in the legislature is far from unique when it comes to anti-democratic abuses of a professed democratic system. Some European nations are going so far as to ban candidates or entire parties from running in elections.
Călin Georgescu, a Romanian right-wing nationalist politician and former candidate for President, was barred from running in the 2025 Presidential Election after the 2024 Election was nullified by the Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR). The Court declared the election nullified without any stated reason after Georgescu won a plurality of votes in the first round of the two-round voting system.
Georgescu gained much support from those feeling disaffected in the current political climate, including rural voters, youth, and the working class. In the run-up to the election, Georgescu — the most popular figure in Romanian politics according to opinion polling with about 40 per cent support — accused the governing National Coalition for Romania of corruption and made it an important issue of his campaign.
During the election, Georgescu was accused by the incumbent, President Klaus Iohannis, of being supported by Russia, that Russia and Israel were interfering on behalf of Georgescu’s campaign. Intelligence documents were released that suggested this interference.
An additional right-wing candidate, Diana Șoșoacă, was also barred from running in the 2024 and 2025 Presidential Elections by a 5-4 majority of the CCR. According to the Court, Șoșoacă was prevented from standing in the election because she “questions and disregards the obligation to respect the Constitution through her public discourse calling for the removal of fundamental state values and choices, namely EU and NATO membership,” an area of agreement between Șoșoacă and Georgescu.
French right-wing figurehead Marine Le Pen, leader of the nationalist right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) was barred from running for political office for five years following a conviction for embezzling European Union funds, after using these funds allocated to pay a parliamentary assistants’ staff party. This will prevent her from running in the 2027 Presidential Election, unless her appeal of the decision is successful.
Le Pen characterized the ruling as a “political decision” and “a denial of democracy.” The Paris Court of Appeals will hear an appeal, with a verdict expected in summer 2026.
Current French President Emmanuel Macron is ineligible to run for a third consecutive term, and with Marine Le Pen polling the highest of the prospective leaders, it now seems likely that Édouard Philippe, former Prime Minister and a centre-right ally of Macron, might win in 2027.
The most notable political party at risk of being banned by their respective government is the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a German nationalist right-wing party that was recently classified by Germany’s national intelligence agency as “extremist right-wing”. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) released a statement, claiming that “The ethnicity- and ancestry-based understanding of the people prevailing within the party is incompatible with the free democratic order.”
The region of Rhineland-Palatinate in Western Germany has passed legislation which effectively bans AfD members from working in the public sector by forcing them to submit a written declaration of loyalty to the constitution and affirm that they have not been a member of an “extremist organization” in the past five years.
A full ban on the party is supported by 48 per cent of the German public, according to opinion polling.
The issue of punishing elected officials for their views is present in Canada, as well, but is found much more prevalent in municipal government and among school board trustees.
Notably, Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) Trustee Michael Del Grande was censured for comments and a performative amendment made during a November 2019 Board meeting debate regarding changing the Board’s position on LGBQT issues in their Code of Conduct. Many of the then-proposed, now enacted changes are in contradiction to Catholic teaching on these matters, the professed faith of the Board.
After multiple appeals being denied and an unsuccessful attempt to have the Supreme Court of Canada hear the case, Del Grande will be forced to accept the consequences of the censure, including completion of a re-education course.
The Greater Essex County District School Board (GECDSB) has censured three of its ten trustees within a one-year period from June 2024 to June 2025. Trustee Linda Qin, along with trustee Cathy Cooke, vice chair of the Board, and Nancy Armstrong, were censured by the board for making comments to reporters about issues before the board, which their colleagues on the board disliked.
Trustee Ron LeClair, who ran unsuccessfully as the NDP candidate for Essex in the 2022 Ontario Provincial Election, filed a complaint against Qin and she was censured in June 2024 after she gave an interview to Rebel Media, and that she had even approached the media. Qin had been given a green light rating by Campaign Life Coalition,
According to CTV News, Qin has a base of support among constituents who agree with her views on “gender policy, Christian representation, and parental involvement in curriculum matters.”
Trustees Cooke and Armstrong were censured in 2025 for comments made the previous year about a contentious debate on the naming of a new K-12 school in Kingsville, Ont. They criticized the undemocratic process by which the name of the school, which was not supported by many community members and some on the board, was pushed through without substantive debate.
In 2022, the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) censured Mike Ramsay, a long-time CLC green-lit trustee, after he supported a teacher who expressed concerns about age-inappropriate books in school libraries. Ramsay was barred from trustee meetings until Sept. 2022 and was unable to access materials available to other trustees. He made a legal challenge in the Ontario Divisional Court for suppressing his right to freedom of speech. The Court dismissed his application and he had to pay expenses to the Court.
Though many of these cases end in defeat for the nonconformist officials — and by extension, democracy — the rare victory emerges, like the case of Laurel Libby, the Maine legislator.
An example closer to home occurred this year in March, when Ron Paull, Mayor of Quesnel, B.C., won a lawsuit at the Supreme Court of British Columbia against the city after his censure and removal from committees the year previous.
According to the city, Paull’s wife was sharing the book Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools) with community members, and Paull himself had recommended the book to other elected officials. Because the book takes issue with the common narrative surrounding the abuses at residential schools, Paull was, according to the CBC, “accused of damaging relationships between the city and local First Nations.” B.C. Supreme Court Justice Hugh Veenstra ruled that all actions taken against the mayor be reversed.
Democracy is not simply the idea that the people should elect their own officials. If the will of the people cannot be represented or even heard through elected officials without interference from opposing officials by a punitive legal process, democracy simply does not exist.
