PARIS – Marine Le Pen stood before reporters on Wednesday and announced she was running for president of France. She made the announcement while under electronic monitoring, with an active criminal conviction, and with an appeal to the country’s highest court still pending. She said she would not change her mind.
The occasion that made this possible was a ruling issued two days earlier by a French appeals court. Le Pen had been convicted in March 2025 of embezzling European Union funds channeled through her National Rally party’s parliamentary group in Brussels – payments to parliamentary assistants who, prosecutors established, were actually working for the party rather than for the legislators they were nominally employed by. The original sentence included a five-year ban on holding public office, which would have made her ineligible to run in 2027.
On July 7, the Paris Court of Appeal upheld the conviction but reduced the ineligibility term from five years to 45 months, with 30 months suspended. Le Pen has already served 15 months of the original sentence. Under the reduced ruling, her ban period is effectively elapsed. She is legally permitted to campaign and to appear on a presidential ballot.
She did not wait. Her announcement came hours after the ruling was made public. “I am a candidate in the presidential election,” she said. “I will not change my mind.”
Whether the legal architecture holding her candidacy together will hold is not settled. Le Pen has said she intends to appeal to the Court of Cassation, France’s highest civil court, asking it to overturn the conviction entirely. The Court of Cassation could rule in her favor, ending the legal threat to her campaign. It could also rule against her and reinstate the original five-year ban, removing her from the race mid-campaign. It could take years to decide. In the interval, she campaigns with an ankle bracelet as a condition of her monitoring and a conviction as a biographical fact.
Pre-conviction polling placed Le Pen at 37 percent in first-round voting intentions – 22 points above her 2022 performance. Among French voters aged 18 to 24, support for the National Rally doubled in two years. Those numbers predate the court’s reduction of her ban, which may shift opinion further depending on how voters read a candidacy that blends resilience, victimhood, and criminal record in ways France has not previously encountered in a major presidential race.
The political conditions are favorable. President Emmanuel Macron is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term. The French left, fractured between Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise and what remains of the Socialist Party, has not produced a unifying candidate. The center-right has not yet identified an alternative. Rim-Sarah Alouane, a legal expert on French politics, noted the strategic uncertainty that defines Le Pen’s position: “If she appeals, there will still be legal uncertainties into her campaign,” she said.
The National Rally has worked for years to normalize itself within French political culture, distancing from its founding association with Holocaust denial under Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and from the explicit racial rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s. That project has yielded results. The party is the largest in the French National Assembly and governs several medium-sized municipalities. Its youth support suggests a generational transfer that goes beyond protest voting. The mainstream strategy of refusing parliamentary alliances with the RN has contained its governing power without reversing its electoral growth.
France’s foreign policy direction under Le Pen would mark a departure from the current government’s approach. Paris has used its diplomatic machinery to impose costs on Israeli officials involved in settlement expansion, notably barring Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich from French territory in a coordinated six-nation sanctions move targeting settler violence. The National Rally has historically maintained warmer ties with the Israeli right and cooler ones with European consensus on Palestinian statehood. Whether that divergence would survive the Elysee’s foreign policy apparatus is unknown.
The broader European context gives Le Pen’s candidacy its weight. The prospect of Reform UK winning Westminster has already sent Scottish and Welsh independence movements drawing contingency plans for a UK that might fracture under far-right governance. European far-right parties are coordinating across borders as they have not done since the post-2015 migration crisis. A Le Pen presidency in France would not be a domestic event; it would reconfigure the EU’s political geometry at the moment the bloc faces its most consequential choices on defence, trade, and a post-war settlement in Ukraine.
Al Jazeera reported that the appeals court decision has been received in France’s political establishment as a shock despite being legally defensible. What remains unresolved is how a candidate under electronic monitoring navigates a presidential campaign, what the Court of Cassation decides, and whether France’s fragmented opposition can find a candidate capable of offering voters an alternative before early 2027. Le Pen’s legal troubles have not stopped her. The question is whether they are the thing that defines her campaign, or the thing her campaign eventually leaves behind.
