The leader of the French far right, Marine Le Pen, was sentenced on Tuesday on appeal to 15 months of ineligibility, a conviction for embezzlement of European funds which does not prevent her from being a candidate for the 2027 presidential election.
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She therefore announced that she will be a candidate in the 2027 presidential election, confirming that Jordan Bardella will be prime minister if she wins.
But the court also sentenced her to three years in prison, including one year on an electronic bracelet, a scenario that she recently considered incompatible with candidacy. “When you are a presidential candidate, you have to be completely free in your movements, and that is not the case if you wear an electronic bracelet,” she declared on Wednesday on the LCI channel.
She should make her decision official on the 8 p.m. television news on the TF1 channel.
Marine Le Pen, president of the parliamentary group of the National Rally (RN), a far-right party, arrives at the Paris Court of Appeal on July 7, 2026 to attend the delivery of the appeal verdict in the trial of former or current members of the RN accused of embezzlement of European public funds, as part of a case of false employment in the European Parliament.
AFP
The decision of the Paris Court of Appeal was awaited by the entire French political class, because it is deeply structuring for the election of the head of state who will succeed Emmanuel Macron in the spring of 2027.
Marine Le Pen, 57, has already managed to reach the second round twice in the last three presidential elections (2017 and 2022). The scores of his party, the National Rally, have been increasing for years and the far right is leading in the polls.
If Marine Le Pen is ultimately not a candidate because of her electronic bracelet, her runner-up Jordan Bardella, 30, current president of the RN, will be a candidate.
“All Scenarios”
The Paris Court of Appeal indicated in the preamble to the reading of the decision that, if the alleged facts are “serious”, the ineligibility sentences imposed were balanced by “the freedom of candidacies” and “the free choice of voters”, “the condition of democratic expression”.
If the appeal judges had imposed more than two years of ineligibility on him, it would have been impossible for him to run.
“We have anticipated all scenarios,” Mr. Bardella assured Monday from the European Parliament in Strasbourg, saying he was “calm and ready to assume the consequences” of the court’s decision.
On March 31, 2025, Marine Le Pen was found guilty of having set up, between 2004 and 2016, a “system” to pay with money from the European Parliament for employees of the National Front (the former name of the party), which was then going through financial difficulties.
She was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, including two years, a fine of 100,000 euros and, above all, a five-year ineligibility sentence with immediate execution, which broke her momentum towards the presidential election.
She denounced a “political” decision by the judges and a “witch hunt”.
“Free to move”
After her failures in the second round in 2017 and 2022 against Emmanuel Macron (and in the first round in 2012), the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen – historic figure of the French far right and founder of the National Front (which became the National Rally in 2018) – has the wind in her sails for next year’s election, the crowning achievement of years of “de-demonization” of the party.
Polls put her in the lead in the first round, scheduled for April 18. At the end of May, an institute even announced her as the winner in the second round, on May 2, regardless of the opponent.
Whatever the decision, “we will never be discouraged, we will always fight, we will go to the end, until victory,” she said on Saturday alongside Jordan Bardella, in her electoral stronghold in the north of France.
