France awaits decision on whether Le Pen can run for president in judgment that could define country’s future – UK Times

The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen faces a make-or-break court ruling on Tuesday that could pave the way for her to lead the anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party into next year’s presidential race.

Le Pen, 57, is seeking to overturn the five-year ban from public office and a four-year jail sentence for embezzling funds from the European Parliament, handed down by a French court in 2025.

That ban currently sits between Le Pen and the election, in which she is a frontrunner. She has cast the ruling as a political decision aimed at derailing her fourth and best shot at the presidency, although there is nothing to suggest that’s the case.

Crucially, the outcome could determine whether Le Pen or her protégé Jordan Bardella, 30, heads the party next April as the latter inches ahead of his mentor in opinion polls and starts to float some of his own ideas, away from the orthodoxy.

The Independent looks at what a Le Pen verdict could mean for the National Rally and France.

Who is Marine Le Pen?

Marion Anne Perrine “Marine” Le Pen is a French politician, former member of the European Parliament, and the former president of the National Rally.

She took over the leadership of the far-right National Front (NF) party from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011 and set out to bring the party into the mainstream with a break from its extremist image.

That shift involved ousting her father four years later over his comments dismissing the Holocaust as a “detail” of history and rebranding the party the Rassemblement National, or National Rally, in 2018.

Her first bid for the presidency in 2012 concluded with 18% of the vote in the first round. Within five years, she reached the presidential runoff for the first time, losing to Emmanuel Macron with a third of the vote to his two thirds. That margin shrank to 41% vs 59% in 2022, before the rising Bardella broke through to become president of the party.

Le Pen has said she is “neither left nor right” but her party embodies the same strain of populism, nationalism and anti-immigration rhetoric that has come to define the contemporary hard-right in Europe. The party has cast support for Ukraine as harmful to ordinary French voters, and officials framed the war in Gaza as part of a wider struggle against Islamism.

Why was she barred from public office?

Le Pen was accused of using European Parliament funds meant to finance the costs of parliamentary assistants to pay employees working for her own political party.

French investigative news website Mediapart in 2013 reported that she had hired two members of her party, then the National Front, as parliamentary assistants. Investigators found these hires were not isolated but part of a wider system of “fake jobs”.

In 2023, after a seven year investigation, Le Pen was ordered to stand trial alongside more than two dozen other defendants over the alleged misuse of EU funds – charges she and her party contested.

Le Pen was banned from holding public office for five years on 31 March 2025 after being found guilty of embezzling €1.4m (£1.2m) in European Parliament (EP) funds to pay her party employees between 2004 and 2016 through such a scheme.

She was also given a four-year jail term, with two years suspended and the other two to be served at home with an electronic tag.

She appealed the decision and declared the verdict a “political decision” aimed at derailing her fourth attempt at the presidency.

What’s at stake?

The Paris Court of Appeal is to rule Tuesday on Le Pen’s appeal, a decision that could determine whether she remains eligible to run in France’s 2027 presidential election.

In his summing-up in February, Le Pen’s lawyer Rudolphe Bousselut acknowledged that “because of the presidential election, the decision you must render is of dizzying significance”.

After four months of deliberation, the court will rule on whether to confirm, overturn or amend the verdict and sentence originally handed down last year.

Le Pen has said she is not afraid of the decision but believes that it is “not possible” to run for president if judges rule that she must wear an electronic tag.

Ten other RN officials, of the 25 originally convicted, are also appealing.

Bardella has meanwhile inched ahead of his mentor in the opinion polls, bringing in a new demographic of younger supporters and leading the party to victory in the 2024 European elections. But it remains to be seen whether the National Rally could win a presidential election without its figurehead.

Asked during a foreign trip last month if he was readying to be the RN’s presidential candidate, Bardella delivered his typical response: “I am until further notice preparing to be (Le Pen’s) prime minister.”

Catherine Fieschi, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote recently that a takeover by a right-wing populist or far-right party in France “would have the most immediate and consequential foreign policy effects, given the extraordinary concentration of diplomatic and military authority vested in the French presidency itself”.

“Le Pen—and her ‘brand’—remains the party’s strongest electoral asset and would likely have a better chance of winning a presidential election than Bardella,” she wrote in May. “Yet her instincts remain more confrontational toward Europe and multilateral institutions.

“By contrast, while Bardella is more market-friendly and potentially less disruptive internationally, he remains—despite his popularity with voters—untested in the uniquely demanding environment of French presidential campaigning.”