Marine Le Pen has been handed a four year jail sentence and banned from running in France’s 2027 presidential election after she was found guilty of embezzling millions of euros from the European parliament.
The leader of France’s National Rally (RN) party was sentenced to four years - two of which will be suspended - and prevented from standing from public office after it was ruled she and 24 other party officials diverted more than €3m (£2.5m) of European parliament funds to pay France-based staff.
The claims date from the period between 2004 and 2016 and accuse Le Pen’s party of treating the European Parliament as a “cash cow”, though she insisted the funds were used legitimately.
On Monday, judge Benedicte de Perthuis ruled against Le Pen and said: “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.”
It is understood any jail time would not come into effect until she has exhausted the appeal process, which she is expected to start imminently.
As the French politician is banned from public office with immediate effect, The Independent takes a closer look at her rise and fall:
Who is Marine Le Pen?
Marine Le Pen, 56, is best known for being the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French far-right politician who founded the National Front party.
In 2011, she took over from her father and has since taken it from a marginalised voice in French politics to one of its biggest parties.
After four years at the helm, she expelled her father after he repeated a previous remark that the Holocaust was a “detail of history” – words that had brought a conviction for Holocaust denial.
During her tenure she changed the party’s name to the National Rally party in an effort to distance it from her father’s racist and antisemitic reputation - but the party’s right-wing sentiments remain controversial in France.
She stood down as the party’s official leader in 2021 and is now a legislator in the National Assembly, the French parliament's powerful lower house.
Though Le Pen is described as more democratic than her father, she has held a number controversial political opinions including her support for a referendum on the death penalty.
She has also been accused of being racist and Islamophobic, having proposed to ban hijabs in public spaces. She holds hard-line views on immigration and favours a “French first” policy with regard to employment, welfare and accommodation.
She has now angled herself as a candidate to succeed Mr Macron, who cannot run for the presidency again, having twice finished runner-up to him.
Her own successor is Jordan Bardella, 29, who took over the helm of the party when Le Pen stepped back from that in 2021. He would likely be her prime minister if she were to become president, but doesn’t have the widespread appeal of Le Pen.
Though she is front and centre on the political stage, she largely keeps her personal life out of the spotlight.
She has three children which were born during her first marriage to Franck Chauffroy who she married aged 27 in 1995.
The couple divorced in 2000 and she later married the former national secretary for the National Dront, Eric Loiro, in 2002 until they divorced in 2006. She was then in a ten-year relationship with the National Front general secretary Louis Aliot until 2019, though they never married.
What could the guilty verdict mean for her?
A judge on Monday granted prosecutors request that Le Pen face an immediate five-year ban from public office, regardless of any appeal process, using a so-called “provisional execution” measure.
This means she cannot run in France’s 2027 presidential election, in which she was a frontrunner in the polls.
In a moment of high drama, Le Pen stood up and stormed out of the court midway through the verdict. She was then driven away from the courthouse.
Le Pen has accused prosecutors of seeking her “political death”, alleging a plot to keep the RN from power that echoes claims made by US president Donald Trump about his own legal woes.
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