The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has been barred from running for president in 2027 after a court found her guilty of a vast system of embezzlement of European parliament funds and banned her from running for public office with immediate effect.
The decision was a political earthquake for Le Pen, the leader of the far-right anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party, who had hoped to mount a fourth campaign to become president.
Le Pen, 56, said before the verdict that that any immediate ban on running for election would be like a “political death sentence” and that judges had “the power of life or death over our movement”.
Judges handed Le Pen a five-year ban on running for public office with the added provision that it will take immediate effect and will apply despite the fact that she is appealing against the verdict.
Le Pen, who left the court before the hearing had finished, was also sentenced to four years in prison with two years suspended and the other two to be served outside jail with an electronic bracelet. She was handed a €100,000 (£84,000) fine. Neither the prison penalty nor fine will be applied until her appeals are exhausted.
There was no immediate comment from Le Pen on the ruling. Her right-hand man, RN president Jordan Bardella, said: “Today it is not only Marine Le Pen who was unjustly condemned: It was French democracy that was killed”.
“It’s a blow to democracy,” Le Pen’s lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, told reporters outside her party’s Paris headquarters. Laurent Jacobelli, a RN lawmaker and party spokesman, said Le Pen was in a “fighting mood”.
Le Pen and 24 party members, including nine former members of the European parliament and their 12 parliamentary assistants, were found guilty of a vast scheme over many years to embezzle European parliament funds, by using money earmarked for European parliament assistants to instead pay party workers in France.
The so-called fake jobs system covered parliamentary assistant contracts between 2004 and 2016, and was unprecedented in scale and duration, causing losses of €4.5m to European taxpayer funds. Assistants paid by the European parliament must work directly on Strasbourg parliamentary matters, which the judges found had not been the case.
Le Pen will be able to retain her current post as member of the French parliament for Pas-de-Calais, but will not be able to stand again in a future parliamentary election for the duration of her ban on running for office.
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Le Pen has run for French president three times, twice making the final run-off against Emmanuel Macron. Her National Rally party emerged as the single largest party in parliament after the 2024 snap parliamentary elections. She had believed she had her greatest chance of winning the Élysée in 2027 on a platform against immigration.
Addressing the trial last month, Le Pen said she was innocent: “I have absolutely no sense of having committed the slightest irregularity, or the slightest illegal act.”
The party will now have to decide who would take her place in the next French presidential race. Jordan Bardella, 29, the young party president, a member of the European parliament, is popular among voters but is seen as having little experience.