Marine Le Pen’s Fraud Conviction Upends French Presidential Race
Due to her conviction, the National Rally party leader is barred from running for public office for the next five years. The ruling has sparked international outrage among far-right leaders and may trigger a political crisis within France itself.
Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally party (RN), was convicted on March 31 of embezzling over 4 million euros’ worth of EU funds. The ruling forbids Le Pen from running for public office until 2030, dashing her hopes of a 2027 presidential bid. The conviction has been met with both domestic and international outcry. A slew of far-right leaders have raced to Le Pen’s defense, while the leadership of the RN has called for mass demonstrations against the ruling.
The far-right leader has already vowed to appeal the conviction, but should the ruling stand – or should it fail to move through France’s sluggish appeals process in time – Le Pen’s exit from the field would throw the French presidential race into disarray. Emmanuel Macron, France’s current president, is term-limited and cannot run for re-election. Polling from March 29 suggested that Le Pen would likely receive at least 35 percent of the vote in four hypothetical versions of the first round of the presidential election, all but guaranteeing her a spot in the second-round run-off. Tests of potential second-round matchups predicted that Le Pen would achieve narrow victories over centrist candidates Édouard Phillippe and Gabriel Attal.
As the leader of her party, Le Pen has overseen a stunning transformation of the French far-right from the fringes of French politics to frontrunner for the 2027 presidential election. Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, won less than one percent of the national vote the first time he ran for president in 1974. Since becoming the leader of the RN in 2012, the younger Le Pen sought to “institutionalize” the RN by limiting some of the party’s harshest anti-immigrant rhetoric and centering messaging around the cost of living. Her strategy has paid off electorally: in 2022, Marine Le Pen received 23.2 percent of the first-round vote before losing the second-round runoff election to Macron. Moreover, the RN won nearly 25 percent of the seats in the National Assembly after snap parliamentary elections were called last summer.
The RN is already fiercely contesting Le Pen’s conviction, arguing that the ruling is tantamount to a death knell for French democracy. Jordan Bardella, the 29-year-old president of the RN, quickly took to social media following the ruling, calling for a “peaceful mobilization” in support of Le Pen. Claiming that French democracy had been “executed” by Le Pen’s conviction, Bardella railed against what he described as a “dictatorship of judges” that has taken away the French people’s ability to express their wishes at the ballot box. These appeals appear to be working: Voters in Pas-de-Calais, the department in Northern France where Le Pen and the RN first built up their local operations, are already echoing Bardella’s refrain that France has become a dictatorship ruled by leftist judges making a martyr of Le Pen at Macron’s behest.
Far-right leaders from around the world are also rushing to Le Pen’s defense. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán simply asserted, “je suis Marine” (“I am Marine”). Several far-right figures, including Jair Bolsonaro, former president of Brazil, and Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, argued that the ruling represented anti-democratic overreach by a far-left judiciary. Dmitry Peskov, spokesperson for the Kremlin, expressed dismay that “more and more European capitals are going down the path of violating democratic norms,” accusing the French judicial system of a miscarriage of justice. American President Donald Trump also weighed in, telling reporters that Le Pen’s ban from public office “sounds like this country,” a reference to his own conviction on 34 felony charges in May of 2024.
Judge Bénédicte de Perthuis, who presided over Le Pen’s case, pushed back against these accusations. Pointing out Le Pen’s lack of remorse and refusal to admit wrongdoing, de Perthuis defended the court’s decision to bar Le Pen from political office. Even so, the ruling plays into the hands of the global far-right, which continues to virulently resist against the constraints that judicial systems have placed on their exercise of power.
Although the ruling may prove to be the end of Le Pen’s political career, the RN itself could be able to seize upon Le Pen’s conviction as a political opportunity. Bardella has been instrumental in expanding the party’s outreach and appeal with young voters, although questions remain as to whether he is too young and inexperienced to succeed as a presidential candidate in 2027. On the other hand, with nearly two-thirds of the public saying that they do not believe a ruling against Le Pen would harm the RN’s prospects, the far-right may have an opportunity to gain from Le Pen’s conviction. Whether as a standard-bearer or martyr, it remains to be seen if Marine Le Pen will still bring her party to the heights of French political power.