Marine Le Pen says a French court's decision banning her from the 2027 presidential race amounts to "political death". The far-right leader was convicted of embezzling EU funds – a blow not just to her, but to the National Rally party she's spent decades turning into an electable force. But is this really the end – or just the start of a new, more radical chapter for the far right?
Prosecutors "want my political death", Le Pen said last November during the nine-week trial over misuse of EU funds by her and 24 other party officials between 2006 and 2014.
On Monday, judges found all the defendants guilty. As leader of the National Rally at the time – then called the National Front – Le Pen received the harshest penalty: a five-year ban on running for office, a four-year prison sentence (two suspended) and a fine.
Le Pen said she would appeal. That means the prison sentence – which she would serve at home – and the fines are suspended while the legal process plays out.
But the ban took immediate effect. The judges used a rarely applied mechanism known as exécution provisoire, which allows certain rulings to apply straight away despite an appeal. The presiding judge said this was necessary to protect public order and prevent reoffending.
That decision was crucial. Without it, Le Pen could still have run in 2027, as appeals in France can take years to resolve.
Le Pen has run for president three times. Her chances of winning had never been stronger, recent polls showed.
“I’m not going to let myself be eliminated like this,” she vowed on prime time television hours after the verdict, calling the ruling a “democratic scandal”.
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Losing the winning ticket
The court heard that Le Pen’s party used envelopes of €21,000 a month – intended for MEPs’ assistants – to pay other staff such as chauffeurs and bodyguards instead.
Le Pen said she was “innocent” and blamed administrative confusion over the roles of staff working in Brussels or in France.
“Millions of French people are outraged,” she insisted. She also claimed the court had violated the rule of law by implementing measures “reserved for authoritarian regimes”.
Despite the backlash, legal experts say the verdict was foreseeable.
Political scientist Frédéric Sawicki pointed to a 2016 anti-corruption law, roundly supported by RN lawmakers, which allows bans on holding office to take effect immediately, even if an appeal is filed.
Had the court not applied that rule, Sawicki said, Le Pen would have been able to run in 2027. If she won, the ban wouldn’t have taken effect until the end of her term – in 2032 at the earliest.
But under pressure from the fallout, the Paris appeals court said on Tuesday it would examine the case in time to rule by summer 2026, allowing time for an election campaign if the conviction is overturned.
Le Pen welcomed that decision. Still, the evidence revealed during the trial suggests her chances of acquittal are slim.
“We’ve lost our winning ticket,” a deputy mayor in Hénin-Beaumont, an RN stronghold in northern France, told RFI.
The former rust-belt town has long been a fiefdom for the far right. Le Pen took 64 percent of the vote there in last summer’s legislative elections.
“I think that they were very afraid that she would be president in the next elections. So everything was done to oust her,” said Patricia, a local pensioner, speaking to RFI’s Victorien Willaume.
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Playing the victim card
“It’s a perfectly scandalous conviction,” said the town's RN mayor, Steeve Briois. The judges “were desperate to get Marine Le Pen. We are no longer witnessing a republic of judges, but a dictatorship of judges.”
RN president Jordan Bardella – a 29-year-old with a big following TikTok following – posted an online petition using the same language.
He accused a “dictatorship of judges” of trying to block the will of the people and launched a campaign with the slogan “Let’s save democracy, Let’s support Marine”, calling for “popular, peaceful mobilisation”.
“It’s clear that Jordan Bardella and a number of RN executives are trying to go very, very far in victimising and supporting Marine Le Pen beyond all reason,” said sociologist Erwan Lecoeur, who studies the far right.
While the court’s decision is clearly a blow for Le Pen, it is not necessarily fatal for the party.
Lecoeur pointed to a recent poll showing that 70 percent of French people believe Le Pen should be treated like any other citizen – and support her conviction.
“But she’s turned the tables and says ‘now I’m the victim of a system’,” Lecoeur said. “She’s making the reasons for her conviction disappear.”
Le Pen allies decry witch-hunt as prosecutors threaten presidential hopes
Plan B
If Le Pen loses her appeal she'll be out of the presidential race, but the party can switch to Plan B as in "Plan Bardella".
Bardella said that if he won the presidency he would pick Le Pen as his prime minister – which he can legally do as it's a nomination, not an elected position.
“There’s talk of a Putin-style scenario,” said political communication expert Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet, referring to the 2008–2012 "tandemocracy" when Dmitry Medvedev held the Russian presidency while Vladimir Putin served as prime minister.
Bardella has already built up a strong support base in the European Parliament and is popular among younger and higher-earning voters. A recent Odoxa poll showed 60 percent of RN supporters preferred him to Le Pen.
But the presidential vote is still two years away. That’s a long time in politics. Bardella’s loyalty may not hold.
A cartoon in satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo recently showed a grinning Bardella pushing Le Pen into a care home – a nod to the shift in power already under way.
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Radical change ahead?
While Le Pen has warned her five-year ban would “kill our movement”, some believe it could also inject new energy – and mark the start of a deeper shift in strategy.
“It’s the end of the Le Pen clan heading up the RN and the French far right,” said Moreau-Chevrolet.
“We’ve entered a completely new phase. We’ve gone from a far right that was trying to stabilise, to normalise, to try and get the reasonable voters, to a far right that’s saying ‘no, we’re going to take power, but on our terms’.”
Moreau-Chevrolet predicts Bardella could become the “poster boy”, with Le Pen sidelined or kept in a secondary role. “We’re liquidating the past, starting from the same foundations as all our neighbours and the American far right,” he said.
But Sawicki said it’s too soon to make such predictions. While the Trumpist approach worked in the US’s two-party system, France’s multi-party landscape makes a power-grab more complicated.
"Going for an openly breakaway strategy, is risky," he said. "I don't think the RN is abandoning its 'de-demonisation' strategy. They're not calling too openly to denounce the justice system on the streets. That would be taking too big a risk."
