Prison penal
According to guilt: Le Pen must not compete in elections
Updated on March 31, 2025 – 1:10 p.m.Reading time: 3 min.
Marine Le Pen is in front in polls on the presidential election in France. But now a court is refusing to compete for yourself.
The French right-wing populist Marine Le Pen is guilty about the embezzlement of public funds in her time as an EU MP. A court in Paris was sentenced to two years in prison on Monday. The criminal court in Paris suspended two more years in prison. In addition, a fine of 100,000 euros was imposed – and five years ban on candidacy. This means that she cannot compete in the next presidential election in 2027.
Before the presiding judge announced the complete judgment and the complete punishment against Le Pen, the politician left the courtroom. The judgment can be challenged. However, it is generally unlikely that an appeal process would come to a quick result.
The result of the process is a disaster for the right party and le with political ambitions. The temporary loss of passive voting rights is a common punishment in France if politicians are convicted of corruption and infidelity. Nevertheless, due to the great popularity of Le Pen, it is a delicate – moderate politicians also registered concerns because it could be narrative that the judgment was politically motivated to prevent Le Pen as president.
“It is my political death that is required with preliminary enforcement, and I believe that from the beginning, I think that from the beginning, Le Pen reacted to the request of the indictment to temporarily implement her notisability for political offices and immediately from the legal force of the judgment.
Regardless of this, Le Pen is expected to appeal against the judgment and a long way to follow through the judicial authorities. Until the end of the election period, Le Pen can continue to sit as a member of parliament, where she is the group leader.
The central accusation in the process was that Le Pens party got racial emblems national money for parliamentary assistants from the European Parliament, but some of them had worked for the party. The affair had burdened Le Pen and her party for years.
In addition to Le Pen, your party and 24 other people are also charged in the process. The defendants include nine former MEPs of the RN-among them Le Pen-and twelve former parliamentary assistants. According to the indictment, the assistants did not work for their respective EU MPs, but were performed by other services in favor of the party and the Le Pen family: as a graphic artist, bodyguard or as a personal speaker.
The public prosecutor sees this a “system” in which the RN used the salaries of the EU parliamentary assistants to renovate the partyinances between 2004 and 2016.
The right -wing party in France will hit the debacle in court in an unfavorable moment, because for a while it has been represented on the rise and in parliament as strongly as it has been. According to a survey published at the weekend, Le Pen lies further in front of surveys for the presidential election. Depending on the opposite candidate, she would come to 34 to 37 percent in the first round.
The right-wing extremist Front National, founded by her recently died father Jean-Marie, named Marine Le Pen 2018 in racial emblems nationally and waived too radical positions in order to make them selectable in broader layers of the population.
The previous plan had been that in a victory in the presidential election and a victory of her party in the subsequent parliamentary election, RN boss Jordan Bardella (29) would have been prime minister. It is not yet known whether Bardella wants to run for the presidency.
Le Pen had always rejected the allegations in the affair about a possible sham activity of EU employees. “I don’t have the feeling that I have committed the slightest impact on the slightest illegality,” she said in the process. With her, eight other MPs of her party were guilty of the European Parliament, as well as 12 parliamentary assistants. In the room there was the possible sham activity of assistants by several French MEPs.
