France's extreme-right Le Pen barred from seeking office after guilty verdict in embezzlement trial

PARIS (CN) — The Paris criminal court found Marine Le Pen, the extreme-right leader of France’s National Rally party, guilty of embezzlement Monday, sentencing her to four years in prison, a 100,000 euro ($108,000) fine and, crucially, a five-year term of ineligibility to run for office effective immediately.

In a seismic shake-up of French politics, the sentence means she cannot run for president in 2027 unless she wins an appeal before then, which looks unlikely. She will not go to jail, with two years of the term suspended and the other two to be served outside jail with an electronic bracelet, the court ruled.

Le Pen, who was sitting in the front row of the courtroom, left before the judge finished handing down the sentences. She went to the National Rally headquarters in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.

It took head Judge Bénédicte Perthuis over two hours to deliver the verdicts and sentencing. Le Pen shook her head incredulously throughout the morning, and looked at other defendants in the room with widened eyes. Her jaw dropped multiple times.

There was a collective gasp when Perthuis read the sentencing.

Members of the RN, and right-wing political leaders across Europe, posted on X before the sentencings were confirmed, calling the decision undemocratic. “Je suis Marine,” or “I am Marine,” was trending almost immediately after the verdict was read.

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s right-wing leader, posted the tag, while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “More and more European capitals are going down the path of violating democratic norms.”

Luc Rouban, a senior research fellow at Sciences Po Paris, told Courthouse News the reaction was likely to continue.

“The RN’s reaction will be, first of all, that we’re victims of a judicial settling of scores and the courts have been used to eliminate us politically,” he said. “And it’s true that she was the favorite candidate for the 2027 presidential elections in the polls.”

The stakes were extremely high for this trial because of its potential to upend the landscape for France’s 2027 presidential elections. Le Pen’s prospects for the Élysée hinged on this verdict, since prosecutors sought a five-year ban on her running for office. Although she has run three times before, this comes at a time where the RN has been gaining unprecedented popularity and polls show her leading the race.

Jordan Bardella, her 29-year-old protégée, is expected to be the RN’s new presidential candidate.

Le Pen can remain a lawmaker in the lower house, but if French President Emmanuel Macron calls snap parliamentary elections, she could not run again.

Le Pen has been on trial since September alongside 24 others on charges of embezzling public funds and collusion. They were charged with misappropriating 2.9 million euros ($3.1 million) in European Union funds between 2004 and 2016.

She and eight members of parliament were found guilty of embezzlement of public funds. All elected officials convicted in this case will face ineligibility, but the length of the ban on public office will vary.

“It’s true that the judgement is very severe,” Rouban said. “What we saw clearly was the escalation of sanctions — the higher up the hierarchy you went, the more severe the sanctions were.”

Investigators said that lawmakers from Le Pen’s party in France, known as the RN, received monthly paychecks of 21,000 euros that were supposed to go to parliamentary assistants in Brussels.

Since the beginning of the trial, Le Pen had dismissed the charges and said the case was a political scheme to target her and the RN, calling it a “political death sentence” during an interview with the French radio station RTL in November.

“There’s real outrage … the public prosecutor’s office has created a disturbance of the peace with its demands,” Le Pen said at the time.

Her skepticism is shared by voters supporting far-right populist movements, Michel Wieviorka, a sociologist and director at Paris’ School of High Studies in Social Sciences, told Courthouse News in November.

“The actors of the populist movements, who are the people who vote for her —  these actors are never embarrassed by the contradictions or problems of this type, never,” he said. “They always have explanations that end up minimizing the problem, or even twisting the accusations — it’s because Europe is toxic and absolutely wants its political death, that kind of thing — they reverse the problem.”

Until recent years, the RN was an ostracized political party in France. It was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, as the National Front in 1967. His blatantly xenophobic and antisemitic rhetoric earned him the nickname of the “Devil of the Republic” in France.

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