Marine Le Pen has confirmed she will run for the French presidency for the fourth time next year, despite a French court upholding her embezzlement conviction on Tuesday and sentencing her to wear an electronic monitoring device for 12 months.
The appeals court ruling cleared the way for the former president of the National Rally party to run by shortening a ruling handed down by a court last year that barred her from seeking public office for five years.
The 57-year-old, who still leads the party in parliament, plans to appeal the guilty verdict to France’s highest court, the Court of Cassation.
Le Pen previously stated that having to wear the monitoring device around her ankle would make campaigning practically impossible, as she would have to stay at her home, except during hours authorized by the judge. After the verdict, she said she now understands the legal process should suspend the sentence requiring her to wear it.
“I will therefore campaign without an electronic bracelet,” she told French media on Tuesday evening after consulting with members of her party in Paris for several hours following the verdict, including her protégé and National Rally’s president, Jordan Bardella.
Bardella, a European Parliament lawmaker, would have been her replacement as the party’s presidential candidate had she decided that electronic monitoring prevented her from running.
What She Was Convicted Of
Marine Le Pen was accused, along with two dozen other party figures, of using money intended for European Union parliamentary aides to pay staff who worked for the National Rally, previously known as the National Front, between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the bloc’s regulations.
A criminal investigation began a decade ago, and many of the charges date from long before her first run for presidency in 2012.
On March 30, 2025, a Paris criminal court found Le Pen and other party officials guilty of misusing European Parliament funds, sentencing her to prison and barring her from seeking public office for five years with immediate effect. She appealed the verdict and maintains her innocence, branding the court proceedings a “political” move designed “specifically to prevent” her from being elected president.
Eight of those found guilty had served as members of the European Parliament, while 12 people had served as parliamentary aides and three were otherwise involved with the party. Only one defendant was acquitted.
Judge Bénédicte de Perthuis ruled: “It was established that all these people were actually working for the party, that their (EU) lawmaker had not given them any tasks.
“The investigations also showed that these were not administrative errors … but embezzlement within the framework of a system put in place to reduce the party’s costs.”
The judge handed Le Pen a four-year sentence—two years of which were suspended and two that were to be served under house arrest. She was also fined 100,000 euros (about $108,200).
The defendants argued that the money was used legitimately and that the allegations defined too narrowly what a parliamentary assistant does.
The Paris court’s verdict drew international criticism from prominent conservative leaders, including then-Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and U.S. President Donald Trump, who wrote, “Free Marine Le Pen!” on Truth Social.
What the New Ruling Means
Tuesday’s ruling upheld guilty verdicts for all those convicted, including Le Pen. The party itself was also declared guilty, with the court finding that it embezzled 2.8 million euros ($3.2 million) over a period of more than 11 years.
But the court scaled back the punishments handed down by a lower court last year.
Le Pen’s ban on seeking office was cut from five years to 45 months, with two-thirds of it suspended. As she has already served 15 months of the ban, the obstacle to her standing is now removed.
The verdict also cut her prison sentence from four years, two of them suspended, to three years with two suspended.
Like Father, Like Daughter?
Marine Le Pen has overseen the transformation of the National Rally from the fringe party founded by her father into one of France’s major political forces.
She was born on Aug. 5, 1968, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, west of Paris, the youngest of three daughters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who went on to found the National Front party in 1972.
Her father built the party around nationalist and anti-immigration policies, becoming known as a gifted orator whose charisma could captivate crowds. A former paratrooper and Foreign Legionnaire who fought to maintain French colonial rule in Indochina and Algeria, Jean-Marie Le Pen during his political career was convicted multiple times of anti-Semitism, discrimination, and inciting racial violence through his “French first” rhetoric.
He was fiercely criticized in 1987 for referring to Nazi gas chambers as a “detail in World War II history” in a radio interview.
Jean-Marie Le Pen shook up the political establishment of Europe in 2002 by reaching the presidential runoff, ultimately losing to conservative Jacques Chirac in a landslide. The result marked the emergence of French nationalism, often labeled the “far right,” as a key political force.
In 2011, Marine Le Pen succeeded her father as president of the National Front, and began a long-term effort to broaden the party’s appeal and distance it from its extremist past image.
Four years later, father and daughter were estranged when she expelled him from the party after he made further controversial remarks, including calling on France to improve its relations with Russia to save the “white world.”
The pair were reconciled in his later years, and Marine Le Pen attended her father’s funeral after his death, at the age of 96, in January 2025.
In 2018, as part of efforts to make the party more palatable to mainstream voters, the National Front’s name was changed to National Rally.
A Le Pen has been on ballot papers at every presidential election since 1988, with Jean-Marie standing four times, and his daughter preparing to replicate that.
Presidential Bid
Marine Le Pen made her first bid for the presidency in 2012, finishing third in the first round with almost 18 percent of the vote.
In 2017, she reached the presidential runoff for the first time, eventually losing to current leader Emmanuel Macron, who received 66.1 percent of the votes to her 33.9 percent.
In 2022, Marine Le Pen again reached the presidential runoff, this time winning more than 41 percent of the vote against Macron in her party’s strongest ever showing in a national election.
In 2024, the National Rally party emerged as the largest single force in Parliament’s lower house, the National Assembly, but fell short of an outright majority.
The presidential election is scheduled for 2027 to choose who will succeed Macron, who cannot stand for a third consecutive term, with the first round in April and a run-off in May if there is no clear winner in the first round.
Marine Le Pen previously said that not being able to make a fourth run in 2027 would amount to “political death,” with members of her party branding the judge’s initial ruling as “election interference.”
In Tuesday’s ruling, the court noted “the voter’s freedom of choice” and said the ban from seeking elected office that Le Pen has already served repaired harm done to public integrity by her wrongdoing.
“Disregarding this would undermine the principle of freedom to stand for election, an essential condition for the democratic expression of universal suffrage,” the court said.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy wore an electronic ankle monitoring device last year after he was sentenced to a year in prison in a corruption case. He was granted conditional release, which allowed him to remove the electronic tag, after just more than three months.
In France, as in the United States, there is no constitutional prohibition on a convicted felon serving as president, as long as they have not been barred from public office.
Kalshi, a U.S.-regulated prediction market where people buy and sell contracts based on the outcome of real-world events, made Le Pen the favorite to win the 2027 presidential election, following the July 7 judgment, putting the probability of her succeeding Macron as high as 38 percent.
She is currently leading in the opinion polls over the center-right former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who has already launched his campaign.
After launching her campaign alongside Bardella in the town of La Flèche, Le Pen said on X on Wednesday, “The French people aspire to new policies that will allow us to break with ten years of Macronism, ten years of failures and disunity.”
Owen Evans, Etienne Fauchaire, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Friends Read Free
Copy
Facebook
Tweet
