News Every Day | 03 April 2025, 05:05

Is This the End of the Road for Marine Le Pen?

On the day an opinion poll predicted that Marine Le Pen would thrash any political opponent at the next presidential election, a judge in Paris virtually banned her from taking part. The president of the court handed down a harsh sentence that left not only the veteran nationalist politician reeling, but all of France’s political class.

Even her opponents on the moderate right, and her main adversary on the radical left, showed discomfort with the increasing influence of the judiciary on French political life. However, they may not agree with Le Pen’s sneer, a few hours after the verdict, that “in the nation of human rights, judges have put in place a system we thought reserved for authoritarian regimes.”

A lawmaker for Le Pen’s party, the National Rally, went as far as to compare France to Turkey, where the politicized judiciary has arrested the leader of the opposition, the mayor of Istanbul, to prevent him from defeating dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the next election.

But these and other exaggerations struck a chord with many French people interviewed at random all over the country after the sentences had been handed down against Le Pen and 23 other members of her party for embezzling taxpayers’ funds from the European Parliament. Admirers of Le Pen fumed at a “plot” by allegedly left-wing judges against their heroine, who, at 56 years of age, was getting ready for her fourth attempt at reaching the Elysée Palace in two years’ time. This time around, chances of success seemed better than ever. A poll by Ipsos published March 31, a few hours before the stiff sentences were read out, predicted Le Pen would get around 37 percent of the vote in the first round against any opponent. In second came a politician of the moderate right with 21 percent.

So, is this the end of a career that has lasted for more than 30 years for the woman who evicted her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, from the party he had founded in 1972 for his repeated racist and ant-Semitic rants? Bruised but unbowed, Mrs. Le Pen came out fighting on the most watched evening news broadcast, reassuring her followers that she would do everything she could to avoid being erased from politics.

Many French people followed with bated breath the reading out of what Le Pen had earlier predicted could be “her political death sentence.” She had left the court early, not wanting to hear that she was to be barred from running for office for five years. The ban kicks in with immediate effect, without a reprieve pending appeal. She was also convicted to a four-year prison sentence, two of them suspended. If confirmed on appeal, she would not have to serve time in prison, but will be equipped with an electronic bracelet, just like former President Nicolas Sarkozy after his recent conviction for corruption. Le Pen was also handed a €100,000 ($82,635) fine “for being at the heart of the system” which saw the embezzlement of €2.9 million worth of European funds, the judge said.

Le Pen was accused, along with members of her party’s top brass, of hiring assistants who for years on end received salaries from the European Parliament whilst rarely showing up there and using the money to further Le Pen’s political interests in France. All but one of them were convicted, albeit to lighter sentences than their leader, whose bodyguard and secretary also were on the European Parliament’s payroll for years.

Surprising, perhaps, was the lack of platitudes about respecting the judge’s decision among conservative politicians like prime minister François Bayrou, who voiced “disquiet” about Le Pen’s ban from politics. She is free to appeal, but basically remains ineligible for public office until 2030.

Even her fiercest opponent on the left, radical socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, considers this a violation of her civic and political rights. “The choice to dismiss an elected official should only belong to the people,” said the fiery leader of LFI, France Unbowed, the main party on the left. Socialist and communist politicians were appalled at Mélenchon’s magnanimity toward the allegedly “racist” enemy.

Laurent Wauquiez of the right-wing Les Républicans predicted the verdict “would weigh heavily on the functioning of our democracy.” Prime Minister Bayrou was once himself tried but found not guilty of embezzling funds from the European Parliament; however, members of his small moderate party did not escape conviction. In France, “They all know that practically every French political party has resorted to similar underhand methods in the past,” a BBC correspondent in Paris wrote. He and French newspapers now harken back to the days when, still a fledgling politician in her father’s shadow, Marine Le Pen had herself demanded sentences for corruption as merciless as the one meted out to her now.

She still has a chance to participate in the April–May 2027 elections if on appeal a higher court squashes her conviction well before that time. Chances of that are slim, but the right amount of discreet political pressure brought to bear on the judiciary might just pull it off.

For the moment, discussing a plan B, in which party leader Jordan Bardella becomes the party’s presidential candidate in 2027, remains taboo among leaders of the Rassemblement National, the former Front National. But if Le Pen’s appeal is unsuccessful, 29-year-old Bardella would be the natural choice to take his mentor’s place. He has proved to be a vote winner, is well-liked among the French, but is deemed too young and too inexperienced to fill her shoes. Over the decades, Marine Le Pen has formed a bond with many French people, shedding the hard-right, racist, and provocative antics of her father, who died last January. Compared to her, Bardella cuts a somewhat diffident figure in the bear pit of French politics, where Marine Le Pen has managed not only to survive, but to thrive.

Until now, the main prize has alluded her, as it may again in 2027. This time not through an honorable defeat in the ballot box, but because of what Bardella termed “the dictatorship of judges, wishing to prevent French people from expressing themselves.”

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