The News
Marine Le Pen, the face of France’s far-right movement and three-time presidential candidate, was banned from running for office for five years with immediate effect after being found guilty of embezzlement by a Paris court on Monday.
Prosecutors accused Le Pen, the National Rally party, and 24 other individuals — including current and former French lawmakers and European Parliament members — of using €4.5 million (about $4.8 million) of European Parliament funds to pay parliamentary staffers for work on the party’s domestic affairs rather than EU business from 2004 to 2016.
Le Pen was also sentenced to a four-year prison term, with two of the years suspended and the other two to be served outside jail with an electronic tag.
She is set to appeal the verdict, and a judge could still decide to overturn the ban on her running for office, according to Politico.
SIGNALS
Verdict sows chaos in National Rally, but could boost its support
The verdict is a “political earthquake” that has generated “chaos” within an unprepared National Rally, The Guardian wrote. Discussions of the prospect that the ruling could stop Le Pen from running for president in 2027 were “taboo” within her party, Le Monde reported, and as proof of her confidence that the verdict could not shake her political ambitions, Le Pen ramped up threats to block the government in recent months. But while Le Pen’s mission to make her far-right party appear mainstream is damaged, the criminal conviction serves to reinforce her “victimisation narrative” that the elite are out to get her, The Guardian argued, and could even boost support for her, a la Donald Trump in the US.
The global far right is unlikely to be hampered
While Marine Le Pen could be permanently shunned from the political limelight, her movement is “set for a long life,” Politico argued: Le Pen was instrumental in bringing the far right into the political mainstream, with her long-held stances on immigration and culture war issues now being parroted by several centrist politicians. Her allies across the continent have rallied behind her after the verdict, with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán posting “Je suis Marine!” on X. While the National Rally — which is the largest single group in the National Assembly after July’s elections — could face reputational damage, the verdict could nourish Le Pen’s anti-establishment message serving as “a powerful force” for populist politicians in the US and Europe, The Economist wrote.
Even Le Pen’s opponents question the verdict
The verdict not only drew fury from Europe’s far right, but prompted some of Le Pen’s fiercest critics to question if the court had “overstepped,” The Associated Press reported: French Prime Minister François Bayrou — who last year was cleared of similar allegations — said he was “troubled” by the ruling and the response from France’s far-left partywas “more measured” than expected, with the message that Le Pen’s fate should have been decided by the ballot instead. Other Western democracies would have interpreted the actions that brought down Le Pen as “entirely ordinary,” a lawyer argued in the conservative UK magazine, The Spectator, while a Reuters columnist suggested that the verdict “risks poisoning the French political debate” for years to come.