Marine Le Pen appeal could mark end of an era for French politics, justice system

PARIS (CN) — France’s extreme-right leader Marine Le Pen told the Paris Appeals Court on Wednesday the sentence barring her from running for office is undemocratic.

“I still believe that the ineligibility with immediate effect is questionable from a democratic standpoint,” Le Pen said, responding to a question about her previous claims the judges at her March 2025 embezzlement trial were politically motivated.

Le Pen is appealing a guilty verdict for a multi-million dollar embezzlement scheme with dire political consequences — she was banned from running for public office for five years, effective as soon as the sentence was passed. If the ban is upheld, she would be ineligible to run for president in 2027.

The timing couldn’t be worse for Le Pen; her National Rally party, known as the RN, has gained unprecedented popularity in recent years and polls predict she could win. She has run and lost in France’s past three presidential elections.

“The decision of ineligibility with provisional enforcement, whether it affects me or not, is eminently contestable,” Le Pen said later in the afternoon.

Le Pen maintains she wasn’t aware of a long-term payment scheme in which $24,500 monthly checks, officially meant for EU parliamentary assistants in Brussels, were rerouted to RN lawmakers.

Throughout her testimony Tuesday and Wednesday, she continued to shift the blame to the European Parliament and her father, the late Jean-Marie Le Pen. He founded the National Front, the party that became the RN in 2018 under his daughter’s leadership. The crux of her defense has been if anything illegal was going on, she wasn’t aware of it.

Michèle Agi, the president of the appeals court, asked Le Pen why she wasn’t careful about applying the rules of the European Parliament when she’s always careful about operating legally in national election campaigns.

“The rules are constantly evolving,” she said. “The European Parliament had accepted the situation for years, fully aware of the facts.”

Agi also questioned Le Pen about Catherine Griset, her parliamentary assistant between 2010-2014, and again from 2014-2016. Although the job description stipulated Griset live in Brussels, she only spent 12 hours there between October 2014 and August 2015.

“Mea culpa,” Le Pen said, adding Griset “was quite severely punished.”

“Yes, you reimbursed us 80,000 euros,” Agi replied.

Thomas Guénolé, a political scientist and author of ‘The Art of Always Being Right When You’re on the Left,’ told Courthouse News, “Her objective, fundamentally, is either to not have a sentence of ineligibility on appeal, or to have a sentence of ineligibility reduced so that it will have already been served.”

The outcome of the trial could have a serious impact on how politicians approach the justice system, which experts say has previously treated them somewhat leniently.

“Until the ’80s, even the early ’90s, there was impunity in the French political world regarding the financing of political parties,” the prominent political scientist Gilbert Casasus said. “And many political parties, both on the left and the right, believed they were above the law.”

But after a certain number of cases affecting parties on both ends of the political spectrum in the ’90s, Casasus said there was a growing sentiment that politicians should be held accountable for their actions just like average citizens.

“Now, the Le Pen case is different because the Le Pen family often believed themselves to be, how shall I say, protected,” he said. “She believed that she herself should never be touched by this new way, or this legal interpretation, of the political financing of French parties, and she freed herself from the law.”

Luc Rouban, a senior research fellow at Sciences Po Paris, shares a similar view.

“It confirms the fact that there is a shift in eras,” he said. “That is to say, we’re reaching the end of an era where there were arrangements with the law, where ultimately, there was a rather flexible set of rules that allowed public funds to be used in a somewhat discretionary manner to finance collaborators, political parties, etc.”

For the RN specifically, the outcome could reset the direction of the party’s leadership. If Le Pen ultimately can’t run, it’s widely expected she would pass the torch to Jordan Bardella, her 30-year-old protégée. Bardella has been credited with normalizing the extreme-right party, partly because he simply doesn’t share the family name and history.

“Above all, it will be an opportunity to ‘de-Le Pen’ the National Rally, to separate from the Le Pen family definitively,” Rouban said. “Which is an important issue, because for them, it would allow them to reposition themselves as a major radical right-wing party, able to attract voters from the [more moderate] Republicans and having distanced themselves from the former National Front, with its antisemitic positions and overtly racist positions.”

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