Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage, populist firebrands who have led their far-right parties to unprecedented poll leads in France and Britain, have made last-ditch public appeals to save their careers amid funding scandals. They both risk failure. But their actions say a lot about the politics of victimhood in the Donald Trump and Brexit era.

Within hours of each other on Tuesday, the pair insisted they’d done nothing wrong despite their dubious financial entanglements, and called on voters to back them over the wishes of the Establishment (and, presumably, rivals within their populist camp).

Le Pen said she would stand in France’s presidential election next year and talked of having “clean hands” despite a conviction for misusing public funds that was upheld on Tuesday. Farage, who wants to resign and recontest his parliamentary seat, said scrutiny of gifts he received from a convicted criminal was a “political tool”.

The timing was pure coincidence; the political undercurrent is not. Both Le Pen’s National Rally and Farage’s Reform UK have used voter anxiety about pandemics, wars and mass migration to reach polling numbers of 25 per cent or more, while public trust in institutions including the judiciary is eroding.

Le Pen’s description of France as a country pinned down, like Swift’s giant Gulliver, by the weight of poor decisions speaks to the far Right’s promise to restore the smack of firm government through sweeping away “establishment” codes and rules. Legal scrutiny can be condemned as a witch-hunt and convictions worn as a badge of honour. While Farage fumed that he was being attacked by a “mob”, Le Pen surreally debated the finer points of whether she could avoid wearing an electronic bracelet via another legal appeal.

If you could distil populism to an essence, this would be it. From Trump’s “Stop the Steal” to Nicolas Sarkozy’s “Diary of a Prisoner”, the politics of unfounded grievance is in full swing and taking precedence over parties and policy.

“Le Pen and Farage’s bet is that the democratic game can be weaponised in their favour, and institutions and the rule of law bypassed,” says Catherine Fieschi, author of Populocracy. There are obviously differences between the two cases: Farage was gifted £5 million (about $6.7 million) without declaring it (he says he hasn’t broken any rules) while Le Pen’s episode was about dodgy party financing at the European Parliament. But they share a desperation to avoid being supplanted by the authorities — or by far-right rivals.

Whether they can finally convert longstanding poll leads into lasting political achievement is another matter. Farage will run unopposed in his constituency because his rivals don’t want to lend any credence to his Trumpian attempt to play the “victim of the elite” card (if this Dulwich-educated former commodity trader isn’t “establishment”, then who is?) And there are indications of voter fatigue even in the Reform-friendly seaside constituency that he represents.

Over in France, meanwhile, the 2027 election will be the fourth time Le Pen runs for president after a series of failures and policy flip-flops on exiting the euro and suchlike. She was very close to handing the reins to her dauphin, Jordan Bardella, who clearly hoped to become his country’s youngest president by steering a post-Le Pen RN into more economically right-wing and pro-business territory. Bardella met Farage in December as part of a search for a continental “patriotic” alliance of Maga-adjacent parties.

While Bardella was seen in centrist circles as the more beatable candidate — his paparazzi-friendly relationship with an Italian socialite aristocrat is one of many contradictions — some of the RN’s rivals hope Le Pen’s sticking around will make it harder for the far Right to attract allies from the finance and corporate world, or the moderate Right more generally. If communism was “the Soviets plus electricity”, her party is “the anti-migrant National Front plus the welfare state”. One landmark policy is cutting the retirement age back to 62.

That leaves former prime minister Edouard Philippe free to plough a sensible-right furrow. He may even count on the world’s best footballer, Kylian Mbappé, as an ally, given his war of words with nativist politicians from France to Paraguay.

And yet, mainstream politicians mustn’t celebrate too soon. The presidential field is fragmented and open, with hard-left throwback Jean-Luc Melenchon polling in line with Philippe. A far-left versus far-right run-off vote cannot be discounted. Even if most French people do not believe Le Pen’s treatment by the justice system was rigged or biased, her poll appeal appears intact.

Le Pen and Farage are under pressure and taking high-stakes gambles. The wheels of justice will turn in both cases and the outcomes will affect their acceptance by the more independently minded voters whom they need to win.

But the politics of victimhood is something bigger and harder to erase. Political polarisation and media fragmentation, driven by America’s tech-billionaire trolls, inflame suspicions that the democratic set-up isn’t working. That will persist longer than the sound of a judge’s gavel.

• Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist writing about the future of money and the future of Europe