Analysis
Le Pen fallout: Some celebrate, others prefer to defeat the right at the ballot box
The French Communist Party pointed out that “Marine Le Pen often accuses the justice system of being too lax. Now she’s finding out that this is not true.”
Marine Le Pen is defiant, refusing to accept the sentence or to withdraw “in any way from political life,” despite being handed a 4-year sentence with 5 years of being barred from holding public office, the latter effective immediately, for defrauding the European Parliament of a total of €4.6 million. “I was eliminated together with millions of French people,” she claimed on Monday in an interview on TF1 at 8 p.m., by “politicized justice,” with “practices we thought were reserved for authoritarian regimes.” She received 11 million votes in the last presidential elections.
National Rally president Jordan Bardella complained of a “democratic scandal,” of “French democracy being executed,” promised a “popular mobilization” and launched a petition in support of Le Pen. Some at NR spoke of an “institutional coup” by judges, compared France to Turkey (where the opposition leader has been jailed) and claimed it had become “a dictatorship of judges” who “want to prevent the people from expressing themselves.”
The sentence landed like a bombshell. Marine Le Pen, already a three-time candidate for the presidency of the Republic and on her way to run again in 2027, with the latest polls putting her ahead in the first round with between 34 and 37 percent of the vote, was sentenced to four years of prison time – two to be served on probation and the other two with an electronic bracelet – and €100,000 in fines, both suspended pending her upcoming appeal.
But it was the third part of the sentence that kicked up a storm: the 5-year ineligibility to hold public office, with “provisional and immediate execution” – that is, not suspended during the appeal and impossible to appeal against as such, a provision of the Sapin 2 anti-corruption law passed by the PS in 2016. Marine Le Pen is thus barred from running for the Elysee in 2027, although technically speaking, if the appeal ruling arrives in time and acquits her or at least cancels out the ineligibility sentence pending appeal to a third degree court (the Court of Cassation), it might make it possible for her to run.
Presiding judge Bénédicte de Perthuis justified the immediate effect of ineligibility as due to the risk of a “disruption to public order” posed by a presidential candidate convicted of fraud and by the risk of a “repeat offense,” given that on Monday Marine Le Pen and the other 21 co-defendants all refused to admit the crime, committed from 2004 to 2016.
Among the former MEPs convicted was Louis Alliot, an ex-boyfriend of Marine Le Pen, currently mayor of Perpignan: he got an 18-month sentence, but in his case the ineligibility does not have immediate effect and thus he can stay in office, in order to “preserve the freedom of the voters,” until the end of his term one year from now. Marine Le Pen will also retain her seat as a deputy in the Assemblée Nationale. The sentences for the 25 convicted (16 former aides and 9 former MEPs) range from 6 months to 4 years in prison, and the National Rally was fined €2 million (€1 million payable and another million in case of a repeat offense).
For 12 years, the party, erstwhile called the National Front, used money from the European Parliament to finance the party's operations in France, a practice explicitly prohibited by the European Parliament, which was a civil party to the trial, and which was the victim of a fraud of €4.6 million. The ruling finds that Marine Le Pen was “at the heart of the system” of cheating, which represented “a double fraud,” both against the EU Parliament and “against the voters.” In 2023, Marine Le Pen already returned 300,000 euros, some of the money she took under false pretenses to pay her bodyguard and chief of staff (after spending a total of only 740 minutes in the European Parliament).
The Kremlin was the first to react, accusing France of “violating democratic norms,” followed by Orbán, Salvini, the Dutch Wilders and Elon Musk. In the end, a supportive statement also came from the U.S. administration: “The exclusion of people from the political process is particularly troubling given the aggressive and corrupt legal war being waged against President Trump in the United States,” said State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce.
In France, the far right is playing the victim card, accusing a “government of judges” and “a political ruling.” The Union Syndicale des Magistrats (USM), the largest French magistrates' union, hit back: “It is not the trial that is political, but its consequences. We must not reverse cause and effect.” The USM added a stern warning against those who “call into question the independence of the judiciary.”
Marion Maréchal Le Pen (her niece) claimed that “Marine Le Pen's only fault is that she is leading our camp on the road to victory.” Eric Ciotti, a former Republican now aligned with the NR, spoke of a “judicial cabal” and asked: “Is France still a democracy? Or is there a ‘system’ to discard those who are further to the right?”
The Republican group leader, Laurent Wauquiez, expressed concern about “a very heavy and exceptional ruling, not very healthy for democracy” – a statement in which one could also hear echoes of the case of former president Sarkozy, who faced a 7-year jail term for accepting financing from Gaddafi for his 2007 campaign. The prime minister, François Bayrou, who was investigated himself in the MoDem trial on parliamentary assistants (but was personally exonerated), did not feel comfortable to comment.
On the left, the Socialists called for “respect for the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law.” The Greens stressed that “all must be equal before justice.” The French Communist Party pointed out that “Marine Le Pen often accuses the justice system of being too lax. Now she’s finding out that this is not true.”
La France Insoumise (LFI) did not join the chorus of support – its predecessor, the Parti de Gauche, had abstained on the Sapin 2 law – and criticized the sentence of ineligibility for public office with immediate application, saying that the far right must “be defeated at the ballot box.”
According to Jean-Luc Mélenchon – who has also been under investigation in the European Parliament for his employment of assistants since 2017 – “the decision to remove an elected person from office should rest with the people.” François Ruffin, formerly from LFI, said the ruling was “good news,” but warned: “Those who believe that if Marine Le Pen collapses the far right will collapse as well don’t understand the country.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/frode-europea-le-pen-e-ineleggibile-destra-sulle-barricate on 2025-04-01