Marine Le Pen, leader of France's Right-wing National Rally, is now the clear favourite to win next year's presidential election, despite a conviction for fraud, a suspended prison sentence, a €100,000 fine and the possibility she might have to campaign wearing an electronic ankle bracelet to monitor her movements.
Marine Le Pen, leader of France's Right-wing National Rally, is now the clear favourite to win next year's presidential election, despite a conviction for fraud, a suspended prison sentence, a €100,000 fine and the possibility she might have to campaign wearing an electronic ankle bracelet to monitor her movements.
It is a remarkable prospect for a politician who has already tried and failed three times to win the presidency (2012, 2017 and 2022) and for whom previous court rulings looked like making a fourth run impossible. It places the populist Right on the brink of presidential power for the first time in modern France, with incalculable consequences not just for the French but the European Union.
On Tuesday, the Paris Court of Appeal upheld her conviction last year in a lower court for being involved in her party's misuse of EU funds between 2004 and 2016. But in a somewhat complicated - even contrived - ruling, the appeal court adjusted the sentence in several crucial ways. It reduced the ban on her running for office from five years to 45 months, with 30 of those suspended.
Since she had already served 15 months being ineligible to run for public office, she was free to stand in the 2027 election. It was almost as if the judges sensed that using the law to stop a presidential frontrunner from entering the race was not a good idea.
The judges maintained the €100,000 fine but cut her prison sentence from four years to three, suspended two of them and ruled she didn't have to be banged up for the remaining one - that could be served under electronic surveillance (hence the ankle tag). Le Pen has announced she will appeal to the Cour de Cassation, France's highest court for civil and criminal matters, which means all penalties are suspended pending the appeal, including electronic monitoring.
The court is under pressure to rule early next year, before the traditional two rounds of voting in French presidential elections (this time on April 18 and May 2). The courts have accepted that neither Le Pen nor her colleagues benefited from any 'personal enrichment' in the misuse of funds. Le Pen has announced she will appeal to the Cour de Cassation, France's highest court for civil and criminal matters.
If it rules against her appeal then Le Pen will indeed be wearing an ankle bracelet in her final weeks on the campaign trail. That might not be the handicap the French political establishment thinks it will be. She will probably flaunt it as an example of the lengths to which opponents will go to stop her being president.
Just as Donald Trump used the numerous court cases against him to his advantage in the 2024 US presidential election by claiming it was the establishment's misuse of 'lawfare' to thwart the democratic process, so Le Pen will assert the same. Outside elite Parisian circles there's already a lot of scepticism about Le Pen's conviction.
She and others in her party were accused of diverting €2.4million of European Parliament funds, meant to pay for the staff of National Rally MEPs, to finance the salaries of party workers in France. It was a misuse of funds, but not exactly Krakatoa on the fraud scale. The European Parliament's rules on allowances are vague. An investigation three years ago found 139 MEPs - almost one in five - had misused these funds.
But very little action was taken. The courts have accepted that neither Le Pen nor her colleagues benefited from any 'personal enrichment' in the misuse of funds. Yet they threw the book at her and her party. It's already backfired.
The latest polls show Le Pen winning 36 per cent of the vote in the first round - 13 points more than her actual first round vote share in 2022 and almost double that of her nearest rival. These same polls show her beating any potential rival in the second round. It's not meant to be like this.
When her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a toxic, Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi who founded the party (then called the National Front), made it into the second round in 2002, all the mainstream parties backed his opponent, the centre-Right Jacques Chirac. Even the Chirac-hating Socialist Party fell in line, though it did campaign under the slogan: 'Vote for the crook, not the fascist.
' It worked. Chirac won with an 82 per cent share of the vote to Le Pen's 18 per cent. Even though his daughter has done much to detoxify the party since, she's faced the same ganging up when she's made it to the second round. She lost 66:34 to Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and 59:41, again to Macron, in 2022.
Notice, however, that each time the mainstream majority declines. The fear gripping France's political establishment is that the 'ganging up' no longer works and the National Rally is no longer seen by enough voters as a political pariah. The fundamental reason for this is that the centre no longer holds sway in France. Macron destroyed the French equivalent of Labour and Tory parties in his 2017 landslide
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