“Tonight there are millions of French people who are outraged, outraged to an unimaginable degree, seeing that in France, in the country of human rights, judges have implemented practices we thought were reserved for authoritarian regimes,” she said.
Le Pen's five-year public office ban cannot be suspended by appeal, though she will retain her parliamentary seat until her term ends. She also received a four-year prison sentence, two years of which are suspended and two years to be served under home detention, and a €100,000 (R1.9m) fine, but they will not apply until her appeals are exhausted.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who has led calls to impeach US judges blocking President Donald Trump's agenda, while also lending his support to European far-right figures, alleged an establishment plot behind Le Pen's defenestration.
“When the radical left can't win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents,” he wrote on X.
“This is their standard playbook throughout the world.”
Judge Benedicte de Perthuis said Le Pen had been “at the heart” of a scheme to misappropriate more than €4m (R79m) of EU funds and use them to pay the far-right party's staff at home.
The lack of remorse by Le Pen and other defendants was among the reasons that prompted the court to ban them from running for office with immediate effect, De Perthuis said.
Le Pen's allies, and far-right leaders from Europe and around the world, joined in condemning the ruling as judicial overreach.
“Today it is not only Marine Le Pen who was unjustly convicted, it was French democracy that was killed,” said Le Pen's right-hand man, RN president Jordan Bardella.
Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who was barred from office until 2030 for abuse of power, told Reuters Le Pen's sentence was “left-wing judicial activism”.
“Je suis Marine,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban wrote on X.