What If the Next French President Had to Wear an Ankle Monitor?
Le Pen’s conviction for embezzlement just took an unexpected turn.
Yesterday, a Paris appeals court upheld Marine Le Pen’s conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds. Le Pen’s party, the Rassemblement National (RN), had embezzled €2.8 million by using a fund designated for parliamentary assistants to pay party staff between 2004 and 2016.
In an unexpected twist, the court sharply reduced the political consequences of the conviction, trimming her prison term from four years to three, with two of those years suspended and the final to be served at home under electronic monitoring.
More consequentially, the court cut the ban on her holding elected office to 45 months, with 30 months suspended. The remaining 15 months are to be treated as already served under the provisional enforcement of the initial March 2025 verdict, which means Le Pen now appears eligible to stand in the 2027 presidential election—something she quickly announced she plans to do.
Under the current ruling, Le Pen would be severely limited in her movements and need to wear an electronic ankle monitor during much of her campaign. In an attempt to sidestep these handicaps, she has announced that she will appeal to the Court de Cassation, France’s highest court. This should allow her to campaign freely until the court rules on her case and (if it confirms her guilt) makes a final decision about the penalty she will face. It initially looked unlikely that all of this would happen before the first round of presidential elections next April; but judicial schedules are unpredictable, and there is a chance that a final decision would suddenly deprive her of her ability to hold rallies in the weeks or months before the decisive vote.
The trial and verdict—and now the uncertainty about whether and when Le Pen will face home detention—have created considerable malaise in French politics. A year before a presidential election, is it possible that the frontrunner and leader of the opposition will have her chances scuppered by judges?
One way to look at it is that Le Pen has become a victim of the paradoxes of populist politics.
Populists frame themselves as political outsiders to denounce the corruption of the existing regime and call for more morality in politics. The harshest critic of crooked politicians is perhaps Le Pen herself. Her father, Jean-Marie—who founded the Front National, the ancestor of the RN, in the 1970s—long made corruption a central plank of the party’s platform. In the 1993 legislative election, his slogan was the brash “clean hands, head held high.” For decades the party surfed on a catchphrase claiming that mainstream politicians are “all rotten” (“tous pourris”).
Likewise, in 2013 Marine Le Pen bulldozed the then-dominant center-right and center-left parties for fielding convicted politicians. She asked: “When are we going to actually implement lifetime ineligibility for all those who have been convicted for acts committed thanks to, or during, their mandate?” Then she added: “They will never do it, because if they do, half of the political class will no longer be able to do politics, given the state of corruption and immorality of the political class in France.”
Those words are now coming back to haunt her. Her best defense has been to counter-attack, pointing out that she enjoyed no personal benefit from the scheme since it was used to pay party staffers (which is true). More pointedly, she argues that many other politicians in France allegedly built similar schemes while in the European Parliament, including François Bayrou, Emmanuel Macron’s former prime minister, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the left-wing party La France Insoumise. While the sums involved in these two cases were considerably smaller, Le Pen does have a point.
Still, for the leader of a party that for decades barked that politicians were “all rotten,” she is dangerously close to admitting that she is now part of the same barrel. This uncomfortable realization has led Le Pen to lean into the second leg of populist politics: that the democratic will of the people cannot be shackled by unelected entities like courts. In this vein, her ally Jordan Bardella, the party’s young rising star, has denounced the existence of politicized “red” judges.
It remains to be seen how much of an impact the ruling will have on the electorate. Early polling found that 51% of the population think Le Pen is right to run in 2027. She will no doubt lean into the persecution angle, claiming to be a victim of the establishment. Le Pen’s opponents will be keen to attack her on the issue, despite the risk that she could gain electoral support as a martyr.
More fundamentally, there is a lesson to be learned for opponents of populism. The battle against the RN needs to take place first and foremost in the democratic arena. Distrust of political institutions in France is at its highest in two decades. The state’s inability to improve living conditions or control immigration is fuelling genuine discontent.
Against this background, hoping that your opponents will be swatted away by judges is a losing strategy. This case shows that judges appreciate the potential costs of being seen as a barrier to the functioning of democracy, and may resort to a politically crafty compromise that falls short of banning candidates outright. In this circumstance, it’s far from clear that Le Pen will step down, and in fact the possibility of her confined to her home for a number of hours every day during an election campaign could galvanize voters who would not otherwise be sympathetic. But even if Le Pen chooses to stand down—an outcome many hoped for in the run-up to this ruling—it’s even less clear that Bardella, as her likely replacement, would be easier to beat in a presidential election.
Trying to choose your opponent rarely ends well. Giving them ammunition to claim that they are being targeted by judges is even worse.
François Valentin is a senior consultant at London Politica.
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