The instantaneous five-year electoral ban imposed on Monday against Marine Le Pen, France’s far-right frontrunner, in the 2027 presidential race, could effectively end her roughly three-decade-long controversial political career. Ms Le Pen, who previously made three unsuccessful bids for the Elysee Palace, has vowed to appeal against the verdict, although according to one legal opinion, there was little wiggle room to overturn the ban. Other less potent terms of the conviction include a four-year prison sentence, two of which could be suspended and the remaining spent wearing an electronic tag, besides a euros 100,000 fine.
After a decade-long investigation, a Paris criminal court found that Le Pen’s xenophobic and Eurosceptic Rassemblement National (RN) party had syphoned off European Union (EU) funds to the tune of 4.4 million euros to promote its activities in France. While the RN’s nine former members in the Brussels legislature alongside Ms Le Pen were found guilty of embezzlement, there was no evidence of personal enrichment against any one of them, the judges were at pains to observe. Politicians from the Centrist Modem Party had in the past been found guilty of similar offences. A critically important question before the court was whether Ms Le Pen could be debarred from standing for an election even while her appeal was pending. Her role in the fraud to manipulate electoral politics in RN’s favour was a crucial consideration behind the harsh sentence. Even more decisive, in the view of the judge, were the implications for the observance of the rule of law, were Le Pen to escape punishment in the event she won the presidential race.
Predictably, Ms Le Pen has lambasted Monday’s verdict as an assault on democratic values, a familiar trope the far-right has deployed to deflect attention from inconvenient truths. Her deputy, Jordan Bardella, has portrayed the ruling not merely as unjustly condemning Ms Le Pen but as an “execution” of democracy in France. The French verdict has united populist and authoritarian leaders across the Atlantic in their denunciation of Monday’s decision. From US president Donald Trump to his top adviser, Elon Musk, Hungary’s autocratic premier Viktor Orban, Poland’s Slawomir Mentzen, leader of the far-right Confederation Party, and Italy’s deputy prime minister Matheo Salvini, there is one common refrain. The ban on Le Pen amounts to an encroachment on the French electorate’s right to exercise its democratic franchise. Some have erroneously sought to draw a parallel with the case of Calin Georgescu, the Romanian far-right former front-runner, who has been barred from the repeat presidential race in May after the ballot in November, which he topped, was annulled over allegations of Russian meddling.
The most provocative recent remarks targeting the EU’s fundamental values were made by the US vice-president, JD Vance, at the February Munich Security Conference. In the midst of the German general election, he outraged his audience with comments that the leaders from the bloc should not force voters what to think and believe. The remarks drew a strong rebuke from Friedrich Merz, Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader and chancellor-in-waiting.
France is bracing itself for mass protests following the judicial setback against Ms Le Pen. As the largest party in the opposition, RN has the potential to destabilise the minority government of Prime Minister Francois Bayrou. The party was instrumental in the toppling of two governments since the general elections in July. A period of instability in the near future seems the more likely scenario in the EU’s second-largest economy. This is an unwelcome prospect, as the bloc confronts the most formidable challenge on its eastern flanks since its founding nearly seven decades ago.
