The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has railed against a Paris court’s “political decision” to bar her from competing for the presidency in 2027, attacking the move to ban her from running for public office as “a denial of democracy”.
In a day of high political drama, Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement of European parliament funds on a vast scale, a conviction for which she was also handed a four-year prison sentence, with two of those years suspended and two to be served outside jail with an electronic bracelet. She was also ordered to pay a €100,000 (£84,000) fine.
A furious Le Pen announced she would lodge an appeal against the ruling, as nationalist and populist figures from around the world rushed to support her.
Donald Trump said the conviction was a “very big deal”.
“I know all about it, and a lot of people thought she wasn’t going to be convicted of anything,” the US president told reporters at the White House. “But she was banned for running for five years, and she’s the leading candidate. That sounds like this country, that sounds very much like this country,” Trump said, in an apparent reference to legal cases that Trump himself faced before he took office.
Elon Musk, Tesla’s billionaire owner, who has backed the far right in Germany and plays a major role in Trump’s administration, said the sentence against Le Pen would “backfire, like the legal attacks against president Trump”.
The judges’ decision, backed by more than 150 pages of legal justifications after a nine-week trial, was necessary because nobody was entitled to “immunity in violation of the rule of law”, the head judge, Bénédicte de Perthuis, said.
It was nonetheless considered a political earthquake in France as Le Pen had hoped to mount a fourth campaign to become president for her anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party.
Speaking for the first time in public about the verdict, Le Pen told TF1 television on Monday night that she would “pursue whatever legal avenues” she could to prevent herself from being “eliminated”. “I’m not going to submit to a denial of democracy this easily,” she said.
Le Pen, who was not found to have benefited personally from the embezzlement, insisted she had done nothing wrong. “I am going to appeal because I am innocent,” she said.
“I’m not going to let myself be eliminated like this. I’m going to pursue whatever legal avenues I can,” she added.
The RN, the single largest party in the French parliament, called the sentence a travesty.
The president of the RN, Jordan Bardella, 29, who could be considered a replacement presidential candidate despite his relative inexperience, said: “Today it is not only Marine Le Pen who was unjustly condemned: French democracy was killed.”
He urged party supporters to “mobilise” peacefully to show “that the will of the people is stronger”, starting a petition in support of Le Pen and a leafleting campaign across the country to take place this weekend.
The ban on running for public office, to last five years, was ordered to kick in with immediate effect, meaning it will apply even though Le Pen, 56, is appealing against the verdict.
Neither the prison penalty nor fine will be applied until her appeals are exhausted, a process that could take years.
In the front row of the court, Le Pen showed no immediate reaction when the judge declared her guilty. But she grew more agitated and shook her head in disagreement as the judge said her party had illegally used European funds for its own benefit.
At one point, Le Pen whispered: “Incredible.” She then abruptly left without warning, before her sentence had been handed down.
Before Monday’s ruling, she had considered the 2027 presidential race as her best chance to gain more ground on an anti-immigration platform, while her opponents attacked her party’s policy platform as racist, xenophobic and anti-Islam.
The French Socialist party said in a statement that the “independence of the justice system and the rule of law” must be respected by all. The former Socialist president, François Hollande, said the judge’s decision was “based on law” for “serious” allegations. But Laurent Wauquiez, of the traditional right Les Républicains party, said it was a “very heavy and exceptional sentence” that was “not very healthy in democracy”.
Mathieu Lefèvre, a member of parliament for Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, told BFMTV: “Marine Le Pen isn’t the victim of a political or judicial conspiracy. She’s perhaps first the victim of herself and a system of embezzlement.”
Le Pen and 24 party members, including nine former members of the European parliament and their 12 parliamentary assistants, were found guilty of a vast scheme over many years to embezzle European parliament funds, by using money earmarked for European parliament assistants to instead pay party workers in France.
The so-called fake jobs system covered parliamentary assistant contracts between 2004 and 2016, and was unprecedented in scale and duration, causing losses of €4.5m (£3.8m) to European taxpayer funds. Assistants paid by the European parliament must work directly on Strasbourg parliamentary matters, which the judges found had not been the case.
Le Pen will be able to retain her current post as a member of the French parliament for Pas-de-Calais, but will not be able to stand again in a future parliamentary election for the duration of her ban on running for office.
Le Pen took over the leadership of the Front National from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011 and began a drive to sanitise the party’s jackbooted, antisemitic image.
She renamed the party National Rally in 2018, wanting it to be viewed as a potential governing force, not just a protest movement, and has run for president three times, twice making it to the final run-off against Emmanuel Macron.
In 2022, Le Pen provided the far right with its highest-ever tally in a French presidential election, winning more than 13m votes.
An Ifop poll published by the Journal du Dimanche newspaper this weekend found Le Pen could have won 34-37% in the first round of the next presidential election and her fate in the run-off second round would depend on whether all her opponents united to vote against her.
The party will now have to decide who would take her place in the next French presidential race. Bardella, a member of the European parliament, is popular among voters but is seen as having little experience.
