Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, faces a legal reckoning on Tuesday that could disqualify her from running for France’s presidency next year and bring down the curtain on a family dynasty that has dominated far-right politics in the country for half a century.
A French court will rule on Ms. Le Pen’s appeal of her conviction on charges of embezzlement stemming from her party’s use of European Parliament funds to pay its own staff. As part of the conviction in March 2025, she was barred from running for public office for five years.
The verdict has been viewed in France as a watershed, critical not only to the race to replace President Emmanuel Macron but also to the future of the far-right movement and even to France’s democratic stability.
If the conviction is overturned, it will almost certainly pave the way for Ms. Le Pen, 57, to make her fourth bid for the presidency, and it could be her best shot yet. If the conviction is upheld, she will likely step aside for Jordan Bardella, 30, the party’s president and her longtime protégé. The party, the National Rally, was founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 1972 as the National Front.
In most recent opinion polls, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Bardella both lead all rivals in the race to succeed Mr. Macron, who is term-limited and will step down next May. Some analysts argue that with her decades of experience, Ms. Le Pen would be a more formidable candidate than Mr. Bardella.
Ms. Le Pen appeared to be girding herself for an unfavorable ruling. “Whatever happens, I won’t be dead,” she said in a French television interview last week. “Whatever happens I’ll continue the fight for my ideas.”
The court could uphold the verdict but reduce her punishment. Ms. Le Pen has said she will not run if she receives a lighter punishment that requires her to wear an electronic bracelet to monitor her movements.
Ms. Le Pen, who took over the party in 2011, has worked to pull it away from its racist, antisemitic roots, though it remains anti-immigrant and nationalist. In three successive presidential campaigns, she inched closer to victory, winning more than 41 percent of the vote in a runoff during the 2022 election, while still losing to Mr. Macron.
Yet Ms. Le Pen is still shunned by much of France’s political establishment, and she lashed out against the conviction as a political witch-hunt. Her grievances carried a distinct echo of President Trump’s denunciation of the legal system in the United States after his conviction on civil and criminal charges.
“Let’s be clear,” she said at the time. “I am eliminated, but in reality, it’s millions of French people whose voices have been eliminated.” The judges, she said, “implemented practices thought to be reserved for authoritarian regimes.”
While Ms. Le Pen never dropped her contention that the charges were politically motivated, she acknowledged during her appeal that some assistants recruited to work for the European Parliament may have unwittingly worked for the party.
“Were they aware that they were committing a crime? I am convinced that they were not,” she told the judge. “And did the party commit an intentional crime by organizing anything? I don’t think so.”
Prosecutors, however, argued that Ms. Le Pen oversaw a complex scheme in which her party paid staff members with money intended for aides to European lawmakers. She was not accused of enriching herself personally but of misusing several million euros in public funds between 2004 and 2016.
The Paris Criminal Court sentenced her to four years in prison, suspending two of those years. The court said the other two could be served under a form of house arrest. She was fined 100,000 euros, or about $114,000.
Ms. Le Pen’s five-year ineligibility for public office began immediately after the ruling. So, unless the court overturns the conviction or decides to impose a more lenient sentence, she would remain ineligible to run for the presidency next year. Some legal analysts have speculated that the court could shorten her ban to two years, meaning it would end next March, allowing her to run for the presidency a month later.
Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Bardella have long presented themselves as a political package deal, with no significant differences in policy. But differences have crept in, particularly on economic policy. Ms. Le Pen, for example, has vowed to keep France’s retirement age at 62, while Mr. Bardella has been open to raising it.
“Le Pen wants to complete her father’s agenda, which is to seize power and govern on their terms,” said Philippe Marlière, a professor of French and European politics at University College London. “Bardella would be more ready to construct and build a broader alliance with the right.”
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
