Judicial independence is coming under sharper strain across Europe as populist and far-right forces intensify attacks on courts, judges and constitutional safeguards. What is emerging is not a single institutional rupture across the continent, but a pattern in which political leaders increasingly challenge the legitimacy of adverse rulings, personalise disputes with judges and test the resilience of legal systems that were long treated as stable.
France illustrates how that pressure is no longer confined to states with already weakened democratic structures. After Marine Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement in March last year and barred from running in the next presidential election, she denounced the decision as political and anti-democratic, while the presiding judge was subsequently threatened online and had her home address shared. Six months later, Nicolas Sarkozy, sentenced to five years in prison for criminal conspiracy, responded with his own attack on the legitimacy of the ruling. Senior magistrates in France have since warned that direct political assaults on judicial decisions are crossing dangerous thresholds, even in a country that has not yet experienced the kind of systemic capture seen elsewhere.
In Hungary, that capture is already more advanced. Viktor Orbán has steadily eroded judicial independence through constitutional and legal changes that have enabled loyalist influence over the courts. Italy has moved in a similar confrontational direction under Giorgia Meloni, whose government has repeatedly attacked magistrates, curbed tools such as wiretapping and pursued reforms that opponents said would weaken prosecutorial and judicial autonomy. Although Italian voters rejected those reforms in a referendum, the attempt itself reinforced concern that conflict with the judiciary has become a strategic political instrument rather than an episodic dispute.
Germany and Poland show a different form of vulnerability. In Germany, pressure stems from chronic underfunding, looming staff shortages and far-right efforts at regional level to obstruct judicial appointments, alongside concern about the constitutional court’s exposure to manipulation. In Poland, the difficulty lies in reversing reforms imposed under the previous Law and Justice government, with institutional damage proving far easier to inflict than to unwind.
The wider legal significance is that attacks on courts are no longer exceptional acts of defiance, but an increasingly normalised tactic in political contest. Once that shift takes hold, formal institutions may remain in place, while public trust in their independence erodes much faster than legal systems can repair.
