Marine Le Pen has attacked a court’s decision that bans her from standing for election after she was found guilty of embezzling funds from the European parliament.
The leader of the far-right National Rally (RN) maintained she was innocent and vowed to appeal against the ruling in a television interview just hours after her conviction on Monday.
After Le Pen was found guilty, judges barred her from public office for five years in a dramatic move that means she will not be able to stand for France’s presidential election in 2027.
Le Pen, who was a frontrunner in the polls for the presidency, was also fined $100,000 and given a four-year prison sentence, of which two years will be suspended and another two served with an electronic tag.
“If that’s not a political decision, I don’t know what is,” Le Pen said in the TF1 interview.
Describing the court ruling as “a political decision”, she said she would appeal the verdict “as soon as possible” and insisted she will not let herself be “taken out”.
She said: “There are millions of French people who believe in me. I’ve been fighting for you for 30 years.
“I’m telling you tonight, I’m not demoralised. Like you, I’m scandalised, indignant, but this indignation, this feeling of injustice, is an additional push to the fight that I fight for them [the voters].
“Let’s be clear, I am eliminated but in reality its millions of French people whose voices have been eliminated.”
While the ban from public office is effective immediately, it is understood that the jail sentence and fine will not take effect until Le Pen has exhausted her appeals against the judge’s ruling.
And unless Le Pen gets the sentence overturned before the presidential election, she will not be able to stand.
Jordan Bardella, who could replace Le Pen on the ballot in 2027 if she cannot run, said on X that Le Pen “is being unjustly condemned” and that French democracy “is being executed”.
Earlier in the day, in a moment of high drama, a furious Le Pen stood up and stormed out of the court midway through the verdict in court before being driven away to the RN’s Paris headquarters.
The ruling marked an extraordinary moment in French politics, with potentially seismic implications.
While Le Pen’s domestic and international allies – including the likes of Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Hungary’s Viktor Orban – condemned the verdict, some of her political opponents also expressed unease.
“A very heavy weight on our democracy,” said the republican deputy of France’s National Assembly, Laurent Wauquiez, after the ruling.
The prosecution said Le Pen was among a number of party officials accused of diverting close to €3m (£2.5m) of European parliament funds to pay France-based staff between 2004 and 2016.
The RN, it was said, used the parliament as a “cash cow”.
But Le Pen and her co-defendants had said the money had been used legitimately. All denied wrongdoing.
At Monday’s hearing, judge Benedicte de Perthuis said: “It was established that all these people were actually working for the party, that their [EU] lawmaker had not given them any tasks.
“The investigations also showed that these were not administrative errors … but embezzlement within the framework of a system put in place to reduce the party’s costs.”
For more than a decade, Le Pen has worked at making her party more mainstream, trying to dull its extremist edge to broaden its appeal to voters.
She led the RN from 2011 to 2021. She changed its name from the National Front, as part of her efforts to distance it from the period when her father, Jean-Marie, ran it and it carried a heavy stigma of racism and antisemitism.
She had positioned herself as a candidate to succeed Mr Macron, having twice finished runner-up to him.
In 2022, Mr Macron won with 58.5 per cent per cent of the vote to Le Pen’s 41.5 per cent – significantly closer than when they first faced off in 2017 and the best score ever of the French far right in a presidential bid.
The future of the party, and its chances at the election in 2027, now hang in the balance following the court ruling on Monday.
