On 27 March, a poll put Marine Le Pen as the clear front-runner in France’s next presidential election. The projected 37 per cent first-round support for the hard-right politician would be the highest for any candidate in half a century. But just days later, on 31 March, a Paris court ruled that she won’t be able to stand for election at all, after she was found guilty of embezzlement.
Le Pen had declared, ahead of the ruling, that such a ban would mean “condemning me to political death”. But it’s hardly clear that this will end Le Pen’s career, still less kill off her party, the National Rally (RN). Instead, the ban has fired the starting gun on a two-year campaign for the 2027 presidential election, in which Le Pen’s name will be on everyone’s minds, if not on the ballot paper.
The sentence was imposed “with immediate effect”, meaning that the ban will apply even before Le Pen exhausts the appeals process. The court, which also convicted eight other members of the European Parliament from RN, ruled that Le Pen would be banned from seeking or holding public office for five years. The court also sentenced her to four years in jail with two years suspended, but she will not be imprisoned before she appeals.
The investigation into the party was launched back in 2015, examining allegations that the party (then known as National Front) had misused €3m of European Parliament funds. The prosecution argued that Le Pen and her colleagues had knowingly orchestrated a “fake jobs” scheme, by which National Front activists were nominally employed for assistant jobs in Brussels but worked full-time as party campaigners.
“No one is above the law,” the Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure insisted before the ruling. But even some critics of Le Pen have doubted the probity of such a sentence. The left-wing party France Unbowed, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, issued a statement that mocked RN’s claims to stand apart from a corrupt political class. But France Unbowed also insisted that it disapproved of the ban being imposed without first right of appeal, and that it did not rely on the courts to defeat its political opponents.
Le Pen did not speak to the press as she left the court. But she had many public defenders. One was Éric Ciotti. Formerly head of the centre-right Republicans, Ciotti was expelled from the party after sealing an alliance with Le Pen ahead of the summer 2024 parliamentary elections. After the sentence was handed down, he tweeted his “full support for Marine Le Pen” and damned the “shameful judicial cabal” that had “snatched away the democratic destiny of our nation”. The Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán also tweeted his solidarity: “Je suis Marine.”
Jordan Bardella, the 29-year-old president of the National Rally, likewise claimed that French people’s choice was being denied. “Today, it is not only Marine Le Pen who is being unjustly sentenced: French democracy is being executed.” The party’s preaching against the “corrupt political class” and its scandals has vanished, in favour of the claim that the legal process is politically weaponised. Bardella, the party’s candidate for prime minister last year, may run in Le Pen’s place in 2027.
In a way, it’s a chance for him to forge his own reputation independent of Le Pen – though Le Pen’s conviction will surely hang over the entire presidential campaign. Bardella’s ratings are not quite as high as Le Pen’s, and his performance in last summer’s campaign was often lacklustre. Recent polls which feature him as a 2027 candidate put him on a third of the first-round vote: still around ten points higher than the party scored in 2022. Recent second-round polling match-ups gave even Le Pen only a thin advantage over centrist contenders, though no “Macronite” candidate has yet established themselves.
An alternative RN candidate in 2027 will surely claim to be the defender of a trampled-upon democracy. But even some centre-right contenders have echoed such claims, perhaps with an eye to catching the limelight. One was Gérald Darmanin, Macron’s hard-line interior minister from 2020 to 2024. In November he argued that it would be “deeply shocking” for Le Pen to be ruled ineligible, which risked “deepening the divide between elites and the great majority of our fellow citizens”.
The day before the sentence was handed down, the conservative daily Le Figaro reported private musings by the prime minister François Bayrou that such a decision would create a “shock to public opinion”. Rather than kill off the RN, it may be more lethal to his government, which does not currently have a majority in parliament. It survived a no-confidence vote in February only thanks to the abstentions of the RN, as well as the Socialists. But both parties could be more hostile to the government now.
When he took office in December, Bayrou promised talks to revisit Emmanuel Macron’s 2023 pension reform, the most unpopular policy of recent years. The Socialists claimed they would wait to see the results before voting down the government. But on 19 March, the country’s biggest trade union abandoned the talks. Not only has Socialist patience with Bayrou waned, but the RN is likely set on forcing parliamentary elections.
Following the snap elections last year, on 7 July, no fresh vote could be held for 12 months from then. Yet that date is fast approaching, and RN can hope that the ruling against Le Pen will strengthen its message that unpopular elites are frustrating democracy. She would not be able to reclaim her seat as an MP. But just months after the passing of her father, Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, and her own self-described “political death”, her party may be closer to power than ever.
[See more: A new government won’t fix France’s political crisis]
Topics in this article : France, Marine Le Pen