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On Monday Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far right party Le Rassemblement National was found guilty of embezzling 4.4 million euros of public funds from the EU in relation to the so-called “fictitious assistants scandal”.
The verdict delivered a penalty of four years in prison, two of which are suspended, two of which are to be served at home with an electronic tag, a 100,000 euro fine and, most importantly, five years of ineligibility to run for public office with “proximate execution” meaning that the penalty applies even during the appeal process.
This means that it will be highly unlikely she can run for office again at the presidential election in 2027.
Following the verdict, US President Donald Trump denounced it as a “Witch Hunt” posting on his Truth Social platform that it was “another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going so far as to put that Opponent in prison.”
Dismissing the case against Le Pen as a “bookkeeping” error, Trump demanded that France “FREE MARINE LE PEN!”
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The reality of the case is quite different, however.
According to the judgement, Le Pen sat at “the heart” of a “carefully organised system” of embezzlement of EU parliamentary funds by running a fake jobs racket in which permanent members of party staff were declared EU parliamentary assistants and had their salaries paid by the EU.
Several other high-ranking members of the RN were also found guilty of embezzlement as part of this system, such as MP Julien Odoul, Perpignan mayor and RN vice-president Louis Aliot and the MEP Nicholas Bay who now sits with Identite et Liberte, a micro-party founded by Marion Marechal Le Pen, Marine’s niece.
MEPs for the Front National (now rebranded as the Rassemblement National) would have one assistant dedicated to their parliamentary work and the rest of their budget for staff would be spent on permanent members of the party.
Two of the assistants for MEP Ferdinand Le Rachinel for example never actually worked for him and were in fact Jean Marie Le Pen’s private secretary and bodyguard.
The judgement describes how when Marine Le Pen inherited the system from her father Jean Marie, she actively chose to maintain it.
She instructed MEPs at a meeting in July of 2014 that they should give Charles Van Houtte power of attorney to decide their budget allocation and choose their cabinets and told the assembled that they would only need one assistant for their parliamentary work and the remaining balance of their budget would be at the party’s disposal.
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Le Pen has continued to protest her innocence by using the argument that it is normal that parliamentary assistants should do political work. She told the court “I have absolutely no sense of having committed the slightest irregularity, or the slightest illegal act”, reiterated her innocence after the verdict and immediately said that she would launch an appeal.
This set of facts, and the news of the judgment, set political discourse alight as one of the most infamous figures of global politics was banned from running in a presidential race that polling suggests she had a good chance of winning.
The global far right immediately rallied to Marine Le Pen’s side. Hungarian leader Victor Orban declared ‘Je suis Marine’, US Vice President JD Vance announced his support for her, as did X owner Elon Musk and the former President of Brazil, Jair Bolsanaro. They all suggested that she had been singled out unfairly, compared to other parties in French politics who have been accused of similar crimes.
However, the crimes they are accused of were of a considerably smaller magnitude to Le Pen and the trials are either ongoing, so the argument is irrelevant until the judgement comes, or settled, in which case they are arguing against the impartiality of the whole judicial system in France.
Additionally, Chirac and Sarkozy also received ineligibility penalties of one and three years respectively when convicted – the lesser penalties could be explained by the fact that they weren’t seeking office again after being president, but perhaps it does point to a minor inconsistency, though Le Pen, having denied everything, did not give herself the option of consideration for contrition.
Others, including her enemies, have claimed that it is undemocratic to prevent a candidate from standing. Leftist former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, no doubt informed by his own experience of democracy a la the European Union when the result of the Greek oxi vote was overthrown by the diktat of the troika, compared her to Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Ímamoğlu imprisoned by Erdogan. This strains credulity. The evidence against Le Pen is overwhelming, the evidence against Ímamoğlu scant. Nor is there anything approaching the same level of corruption of the judiciary in France as Turkey.
This is not to say there are no causes for concern regarding the politicisation of the law in France. There is an emerging pattern in French politics of allies of Macron getting off lightly and enemies of his going down. Bernard Arnault, believed to have financed Macron’s first presidential campaign,