Why French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has been banned from running for office

There’s been plenty of “political mudslinging” since France’s Marine Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to an immediate five-year ban from running for public office, says Victor Goury-Laffont in Politico. Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the Kremlin, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have “all weighed in”.

Many have criticised the verdict as an “anti-democratic attempt” to bar an opposition candidate – and the current front-runner – from competing for the French presidency in 2027.

On the other side of the debate, the verdict has been hailed as justified because Le Pen has been found guilty of embezzling EU money to fund her party over 11 years, says Bruno Waterfield in The Times. As Rémy Heitz, one of France’s two top judges, told RTL, this was a judicial decision, “handed down by three independent, impartial judges”.

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Since the verdict, Le Pen’s tone has risen to “histrionic heights”, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in The Telegraph. At one point she even compared herself to the late Alexei Navalny, the opponent of Vladimir Putin. While she and her 12 former assistants are “undeniably guilty” of using money (€4.4 million) from the European Parliament to “finance National Rally aides”, she may have a right to feel singled out.

Albeit on a smaller scale, members of both Francois Bayrou’s centrist party and Jean-Luc Melenchon’s hard-left party have got into hot water for allegedly using parliamentary assistants for partisan purposes.

The main target of her “outrage”, however, is the Sapin Bill, which president François Hollande tightened in 2016 to ensure that “any politician condemned for corruption would be barred from running for office even if they appealed”. Top legal experts have said that it “contradicts the spirit of judicial independence”.

Marine LePen may be down but she is far from out

It’s possible that the constitutional council could be asked to look into whether the verdict “somehow contravenes the French constitution”, says Henry Samuel in The Telegraph. However, Le Pen’s main hope of running in the 2027 presidential election is if the decision is reversed by appeal before then.

There is no way to challenge the immediate ban, but the Paris Court of Appeals threw Le Pen a “potential lifeline” on Tuesday by saying it aimed to decide the appeal in the summer of 2026, giving her plenty of time to prepare for an election, says Leila Abboud in the Financial Times.

The third option is for Emmanuel Macron to grant her a presidential pardon, says Samuel. Since he has limited himself to commenting, “The law is the same for everyone”, this seems unlikely.

For now, Le Pen will not “disappear from the political stage”, says Abboud. She can still continue as a member of France’s National Assembly, in which her party is the largest single opposition grouping, with 123 MPs. During her political career, which spans nearly 30 years, she has worked to “detoxify” the party’s racist image and win over working-class and rural as well as older, wealthier voters, steadily increasing its vote share to roughly one third.

The party’s young, charismatic president and likely Le Pen successor, Jordan Bardella, has announced demonstrations across France this weekend and started a petition, which has attracted so many signatures that the platform has crashed, says Waterfield.

If a narrative takes hold that France’s “democratic destiny” has been “confiscated” by a “judicial cabal”, it will reinforce the National Rally argument that the political system is “rigged against them after the party was locked out of power by tactical voting in the parliamentary elections last year”. This verdict could “mobilise” the party’s base and “shore up support” as it heads into an election campaign in 2027.

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