The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s 2027 presidential bid is hanging in the balance as she was sentenced to wear an electronic ankle tag after being found guilty of embezzling European parliament funds.
The Paris court of appeal upheld Le Pen’s conviction but shortened her ban on running for elected office, potentially reopening a narrow path for the far-right leader to stand in the 2027 presidential race.
However, the court also handed Le Pen a three-year jail term, with two years suspended and one year spent under house arrest in which she must wear an electronic ankle tag for monitoring. This could make a presidential campaign politically and logistically difficult.
Le Pen, who heads the anti-immigration the National Rally (RN) party, has previously suggested she would not run if she were handed an adjusted custodial sentence in which her movements were restricted or she had to wear an electronic tag.
“If I’m allowed to be a candidate but am effectively prevented from campaigning freely, then you understand that wouldn’t be possible,” Le Pen said in an interview last week.
Le Pen, who is a member of parliament for the Pas-de-Calais, was in talks at her party headquarters on Tuesday afternoon on whether she could run for president, and whether she should lodge a further appeal with France’s highest court. Her decision to run could depend on the exact restrictions of an electronic tag. Le Pen has said if she cannot go out at night to meet voters at rallies, it would be hard to campaign.
The first step for a person ordered to wear an electronic tag is generally a meeting with a special judge, which can take place within weeks or months. The judge will ask about the person’s work schedule in order to establish when they can leave their home wearing a tag and what time they must return home in the evening and at weekends. Le Pen could request a reduction in the length of the sentence to six months.
The far-right figurehead was expected to make her first comments on the verdict on French television news on Tuesday night.
The Paris court decided that Le Pen, 57, had played a central role in orchestrating a fake-jobs scam of unprecedented size and duration to embezzle European parliament funds and funnel the money into paying her party in Paris between 2004 and 2016.
Le Pen’s ban on running for public office was shortened to 15 months – which she has already served – with the remaining 30 months suspended. She was also given a €100,000 (£85,000) fine.
Jordan Bardella, 30, who as party president already handles the day-to-day running of the RN, had been on standby as a potential replacement presidential candidate if Le Pen was unable to run.
Patrick Maisonneuve, a lawyer for the European parliament, said outside court that the appeal judges had been clear on politicians’ duty of integrity. He said: “If [Marine Le Pen] does not lodge a further appeal, that means she accepts that she is definitively guilty of embezzlement. Can you run for France’s highest office, the presidency, when you have been found guilty of embezzling public funds? That is a political responsibility.”
The leftwing MP François Ruffin said: “The very fact that it even crosses our minds that Marine Le Pen might campaign while wearing an electronic tag is a sign that corruption is accepted in our country.”
Manon Aubry, of the radical left La France Insoumise, said: “The RN entered politics with the slogan ‘heads held high, hands clean’. They are leaving it with ‘heads bowed, hands dirty’.”
Le Pen had been considered one of the top contenders for the 2027 presidency until last March when, after a first trial, she was barred from running for election for five years with immediate effect.
She appealed against last year’s verdict and a fresh trial at Paris’s court of appeal was held this year.
State prosecutors summing up the case said Le Pen had been at the centre of a “thought-out”, “centralised” and almost “industrial” system to embezzle European parliament funds.
They told the court that taxpayer money allocated to members of the European parliament to pay their assistants based in Strasbourg or Brussels was siphoned off by the party from 2004 to 2016 to pay its own workers in France, in violation of the parliament’s rules.
The staff in France had no connection to work undertaken at the European parliament, prosecutors said. The loss to European funds was estimated at €4.8m (£4.2m). The party, then called Front National, made substantial savings through the system, the prosecutors said. The system was well documented in email exchanges and party papers.
Le Pen had hoped to run for president for a fourth time next spring when Emmanuel Macron’s two terms in office end. She has twice lost to Macron in the final run-off, in 2017 and in 2022, when she increased her score to more than 41%.
Le Pen had said before Tuesday’s verdict that if necessary she would support Bardella, her protege, with “energy, confidence and conviction”, adding: “We never give up.”
