French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen has been banned from standing at the next election after being found guilty of embezzlement. 

Presiding Judge Bénédicte de Perthuis has sentenced Le Pen, 56, to a five-year ban from politics while handing her a £84,000 fine.

She has been given a four-year prison sentence, with two years suspended. The remaining two years might be served with an electronic bracelet instead of being in custody. However, the candidate for president is expected to challenge the decision, so the prison time and fine will be postponed.

Prosecutors wanted Le Pen to face a five-year ban from public office as well as a five-year jail sentence. 

Before finding out the length of her disqualification, which means the far-right leader won’t be allowed to participate in the 2027 presidential election, Le Pen left the Paris court in a hurry.

The verdict was reached after the politician and several party members were convicted earlier today. They were found guilty of using funds meant for parliamentary assistants in the European Union to pay party employees from 2004 to 2016. This action breached the regulations of the 27-nation bloc.

Perthuis, said Le Pen’s actions amounted to a ‘serious and lasting attack on the rules of democratic life in Europe, but especially in France.’ 

In a hard-hitting judgement, magistrates also accused Le Pen of ‘undermining democracy’.

They wrote: ‘Marine Le Pen has been at the heart of this illegal system since 2009. The events have seriously and lastingly undermined the rules of democracy. This is an enrichment of the party, a circumvention of the rules governing political party financing, and therefore a circumvention of democracy.’

Le Pen and other co-defendants denied wrongdoing during the nine-week trial that took place in late 2024, and she claims that was being put on trial as a ‘political target’. The defendants also claimed the money had been used legitimately.

The presidential hopeful has been found guilty of misappropriating around £397,000, in particular for the contracts of her bodyguard, Thierry Légier, and her former parliamentary attaché and ex-sister-in-law, Catherine Griset. 

Griset has been handled a one-year suspended prison sentence and a two-year electoral ban, but details of Le Pen’s ban are yet to be confirmed. 

Louis Aliot, former number two of the National Rally, has been sentenced to 18 months in jail, with ten months suspended. The remainder will be under an electronic bracelet.

He has also been slapped with a three year ban but no provisional one ‘to preserve the freedom of voters who chose their mayor’, the judge has said.

Perthuis said the ineligibility to run for public office should begin straightaway and not be suspended. Le Pen has described such a scenario as ‘political death’.

The MEPs and 12 assistants found guilty signed ‘fictitious contracts’ and there was indeed a ‘system’ within the party, said Perthuis.

‘It has been established that all these people were in fact working for the party, that their MEP had not entrusted them with any tasks’ and that they ‘moved from one MEP to another’, she continued.

‘It was not a question of pooling the work of the assistants but rather of pooling the MPs’ envelopes.

‘Let’s be clear: no one is on trial for playing politics, that’s not the point. The issue was whether or not the contracts were respected’, Perthuis added.

Following the ban against Le Pen running for president, political opponent Éric Coquerel, MP for radical Left party France Unbowed told French news channel LCI: ‘I don’t agree that things that should be decided by the ballot box are decided by the courts.

‘It will only paint the National Rally as a victim’.

The Kremlin on Monday also slammed the French court’s ruling to bar Pen from running for office over a fake jobs scheme.

‘More and more European capitals are going down the path of violating democratic norms,’ Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a briefing when asked about the decision.

Displaying public support to Le Pen, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban posted on X: ‘Je suis Marine!’, translating to I am Marine!, following her recent ban from French politics.

Le Pen appeared to be anticipating a guilty verdict, telling the panel of three judges earlier: ‘I feel we didn’t succeed in convincing you.’

During the nine-week trial that took place in late 2024, she argued that ineligibility ‘would have the effect of depriving me of being a presidential candidate’ and disenfranchise her supporters.

‘There are 11 million people who voted for the movement I represent. So tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French people would see themselves deprived of their candidate in the election,’ she told the panel of three judges.

Following her trial last year, current French Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin posted on X that it would be ‘profoundly shocking’ if Le Pen were to be barred from elections.

She also denied she had committed ‘the slightest irregularity’. 

Her young lieutenant and protege Jordan Bardella, 29, who is the RN party chief, was not among the accused in the trial and is also seen as a potential presidential contender should Marine Le Pen fall. 

In a documentary broadcast by BFMTV late on Sunday, Le Pen for the first time gave her blessing to Bardella becoming president. 

‘Of course he has the capacity to become president of the republic,’ she said. 

Bardella has spoken out on Le Pen’s recent ban, taking to X to share the message: ‘Today, it is not only Marine Le Pen who is being unjustly condemned: it is French democracy that is being executed’.

French politician Eric Zemmour similarly said: ‘It is not up to judges to decide who the people should vote for. 

‘Whatever our disagreements, Marine Le Pen is legitimate to present herself to the vote. 

‘I regret that politicians have voluntarily given this exorbitant power to the justice system. Everything will have to change’.

For over a decade, Le Pen has worked at making her party more mainstream, dulling its extremist edge to broaden its appeal to voters. 

After coming third in the 2012 presidential polls, Marine Le Pen made the run-off in 2017 and 2022 but was beaten by Emmanuel Macron on both occasions.

Yet 2027 could be a different opportunity, with Macron not allowed to stand again.

Le Pen’s life has been marked by the legacy of her openly racist father, a veteran of the long war in Algeria that ultimately led to the former French colony’s independence.

Le Pen in 2011 took over leadership of the National Front (FN) from her father Jean-Marie, who co-founded France’s main postwar far-right movement.

Distancing it from the legacy of her father, who openly made anti-Semitic and racist statements, she renamed the party the National Rally (RN) and embarked on a policy she dubbed ‘dediabolisation’ (‘de-demonisation’).

The work bore fruit in the snap legislative polls last summer, with the RN emerging as the largest single party in the National Assembly, although without the outright majority it had targeted.

That gave Le Pen unprecedented power over French politics, which she used by backing a no-confidence vote that toppled the government of prime minister Michel Barnier later in the year.

Critics accuse the party of still being inherently racist, taking too long to distance itself from Russia and resorting to corrupt tactics to ease its strained finances, allegations Le Pen denies.

But playing on people’s day-to-day concerns about immigration and the cost of living, Le Pen is now seen as having her best chance to win the French presidency in 2027 after three unsuccessful attempts.