| There is a possible route back for Marine Le Pen: if she successfully appeals before the early 2027 deadline to register her candidacy for the presidential race, she could theoretically still run. But French legal experts do not expect the process will have concluded by then. National Rally (RN) – notorious as the National Front in its earlier, more explicitly extreme, incarnation – may decide that it is not worth the risk of waiting for her. Her shot at the presidency has therefore probably evaporated – perhaps meaning the beginning of the end of a political career in which she has managed to maintain her far right positions on immigration while persuading voters that she is more palatable than her father, Jean-Marie. Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s right-hand man in RN, certainly spoke yesterday as if her candidacy was over: “Today it is not only Marine Le Pen who was unjustly condemned,” he said. “It was French democracy that was killed.” Now, Jon Henley said, Le Pen faces a choice: “Does she accept the verdict, campaign on behalf of Bardella as her replacement, and accept that her moment has passed – or does she fight it, push the narrative of ‘activist judges’, and try to bring the French political order crashing down?” What were the charges? The case concerned National Rally using European parliament funds between 2004 and 2016 to fund party workers with no role in the Strasbourg legislature. RN was critically short of funds for most of that period, and according to prosecutors, set up a “war machine” to embezzle the funds by falsely claiming its staff were assistants for members of the European parliament. Prosecutors cited emails and other records showing that some of the workers with no role at the European parliament were employed in jobs from bodyguard to private secretary in France. The arrangement cost European taxpayers at least €4m (£3.35m). Angelique Chrisafis sets out more detail in this analysis piece. Le Pen insisted that she had “absolutely no sense” of having broken the law. But the judge agreed with prosecutors that she had played a central role in the scheme. “The evidence was pretty damning,” Jon said. “You had people being paid by the European parliament who never once set foot in Brussels. One of them was the Le Pen family chauffeur. The judge made very clear that she was, if not the instigator, at the centre of this system.” Why did the verdict disqualify her from office? The charges could theoretically have seen Le Pen banned from seeking office for even longer – up to 10 years. Prosecutors sought a five-year ban, and the judge agreed, saying: “The court took into consideration, in addition to the risk of reoffending, the major disturbance of public order if a person already convicted … was a candidate in the presidential election.” While Le Pen’s ban is among the most significant such sentences handed down recently in France – because she remains a crucial political player – as a matter of law it is not unprecedented. Former president Jacques Chirac got a two-year suspended sentence in a 2011 corruption case. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy was banned from public office for three years in 2023. And in 2004, Alain Juppé, who was expected to be a centre-right presidential candidate, was barred from public office over a 1980s party financing scandal. “The irony is that Le Pen spoke in favour of the law that means she’s now ineligible,” Jon said. “Legally the disqualification appears completely sound, and French courts have not been shy of condemning politicians in the past. But even if you see this as the correct legal decision you may be nervous about the political fallout. The court was in an invidious position.” How have politicians responded? After the sentence was handed down, far-right figures across Europe expressed outrage. (Jon has a summary of all the reaction here.) In Italy, the deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini called the ruling a “declaration of war by Brussels”. The Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders said he was “shocked” by the verdict. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, said: “I am Marine!” In the Kremlin, meanwhile, spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters the verdict was evidence that “more and more European capitals are going down the path of violating democratic norms”. Donald Trump compared the case to his own legal travails, as did Elon Musk. Perhaps more interesting were the responses of Le Pen’s domestic opponents, because they suggest where they think the political incentives lie. While some, like Marine Tondelier, leader of the Greens, said the verdict was simply a case of a politician being “just like any other person subject to the law”, others appeared to be wary of appearing to exult in the removal of a major rival. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the leftwing La France Insoumise (LFI) party, said that “the decision to remove a politician from office should be decided by the people”. And Laurent Wauquiez, a mainstream conservative MP who may be the presidential candidate for Les Républicains, said: “I think that political debates should be decided at polling stations.” How will the French public respond? Recent opinion polls have shown Le Pen as the clear frontrunner for the 2027 election. Bardella, a 29-year-old member of the European parliament, is a high-profile but inexperienced likely replacement. “He has been groomed to be prime minister, but within the party most people accept that he’s too young,” Jon said. “He’s popular with their voters, but among members and in the hierarchy he’s seen as a bit too big for his boots.” Ashifa Kassam has a profile of him here. Some in the party have complained more should have been done to work out a contingency plan in case of Le Pen’s disqualification. “It’s a bit amateurish,” one National Rally lawmaker told Politico recently. “There is not a depth of talent in the party, and they are not particularly well-organised,” Jon said. The crucial unknown is whether the inevitable argument that the verdict is an establishment stitch-up resonates beyond the far right’s traditional supporters. “Their base are already pretty wound up by the idea that the system is against them, partly because of the history of the republican front,” Jon said, referring to the longstanding history of mainstream rivals co-operating to keep extremists out of office. “But it’s difficult to exaggerate how much Le Pen has sought to present herself as restrained and moderate for the last decade, and for either her or her party to abandon that in favour of attacking judges – that would be a big test of where the voters who flirt with supporting her now stand.” What will the decision mean for French politics in the meantime? Le Pen sits as an MP, and the conviction does not force her to stand down from that role – although it prevents her seeking re-election. But there may be more immediate consequences for France’s fragile parliament, where the prime minister, François Bayrou – an ally of the president, Emmanuel Macron – runs a minority administration. “She could bring the government down quite easily,” Jon said. “All she would have to do is table a motion of no confidence that she was confident the far left would support, or back a motion of theirs.” Until now, with a geopolitical crisis concocted in Washington and Moscow consuming France and Europe’s political energies, “there has been a sense that swing voters would consider it irresponsible to choose that route”, Jon said. “But Le Pen will now be considering whether her supporters are indignant enough to change that calculus.” | 