Far-right leader Marine Le Pen will be able to run in France’s presidential election next year, though her involvement remained in doubt Tuesday after a Paris appeals court upheld her conviction for misusing European Union funds.
The court shortened her ban on running for elected office, potentially reopening the path for her to run. However it ruled she must wear an electronic ankle tag for a year, making a campaign both logistically and politically difficult.
Le Pen herself appeared to rule out a run if she was forced to wear a tag. “If I’m allowed to be a candidate but am effectively prevented from campaigning freely, then you understand that wouldn’t be possible,” she said in an interview last week.
Le Pen, 57, who has run for president in France thrice, was banned from holding public office for five years in March last year after a court found her guilty of embezzling 1.4 million euros ($1.6 million) in European Parliament money to hire two high-ranking members of her party, then known as the National Front, as parliamentary assistants.
E.U. lawmakers are provided funds to cover expenses and the salaries of parliamentary assistants, but are not allowed to use them for party activities.
Investigators said they later discovered these hires made between 2004 and 2016 were not isolated cases but part of a wider system of “fake jobs.”
Le Pen, who came second to President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and again in 2022, was handed a four-year jail term, two of which were suspended and hit with a fine of 100,000 euros ($114,355). She was allowed to serve the other two in home detention with an electronic tag.
Her party, was also fined 2 million euros ($2.29 million), half of which was suspended.
At the time, Le Pen claimed that her party was victim to a “witch hunt,” and she denounced the outcome as a “democratic scandal.”
At the time, her party, which changed it’s name to National Rally in 2018, was ahead in the polls and she was widely seen as the likely front-runner to succeed Macron in the 2027 election until last year’s ruling.
Some supporters sent death threats to Benedicte de Perthuis, the judge in her case, according to Agence France-Presse.
Having argued at her first trial that the money had been used legitimately, at her appeal she claimed at appeal that the party had “absolutely no sense of doing anything wrong whatsoever.”
Le Pen had stepped down as National Rally president in 2021 to focus on the presidential race, handing the role down to Jordan Bardella, the party’s current leader and a longtime admirer of his former boss.
In a lengthy post on X on Monday praising Le Pen, Bardella, 30, said his support for his predecessor, who inspired him to join the National Rally at the age of 16, was “total.”
“Nothing can justify Marine Le Pen being excluded from the choice of the French people and prevented from presenting herself before them,” he wrote.
In comments last week, Le Pen said she wasn’t “scared” as she waited to learn the court’s decision in her appeal, according to the AFP.
“If I can run, I will — as long as I can campaign,” she said.
Le Pen is due to give a prime-time TV interview on TF1 at 8 p.m. local time (2 p.m. ET), in which she may make an announcement on her political future.
She could still appeal to the Court of Cassation, France’s highest court, but it’s unclear whether judges would suspend the sentence pending a final ruling.
The Court of Cassation has previously said that, if asked to review the case, it would seek to issue a ruling before the 2027 presidential election.
