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Last week, however, Le Pen, her party and 23 of her far-right allies were found guilty of misappropriating more than €4 million in European Parliament funds. A three-judge panel took the extraordinary — though not unprecedented — decision to immediately ban her from running for office for five years, rather than delaying the punishment until the appeals process plays out, as is usual in France. The decision effectively bars Le Pen from standing in the 2027 presidential election, unless it is overturned on appeal.
In response, Le Pen has unleashed an almighty attack on a what she sees as a system and a judiciary rigged against the National Rally, a strategy that threatens to erode confidence in France’s democratic system.
“This judgement will further polarize French society, which is already divided and which will become more divided,” said Alberto Alemanno, a EU law lecturer at HEC business school in Paris.
Among the problems facing the French political establishment is that while the evidence against Le Pen is compelling, there’s a grain of truth in her claims that “the system” is against her. The far-right leader has routinely struggled to get bank loans to fund election campaigns or to get the backing of enough officials to run for office, while the so-called Republican Front sees parties that have little in common uniting merely to keep the National Rally from power.
Even Le Pen’s political adversaries have questioned whether the court erred in barring her from the 2027 election, though their critiques have been of the decision itself and remain a far cry from the full-throated attacks on the independent judiciary coming from the National Rally. The current justice minister said in November, before he took up his post, that it would be “shocking” if Le Pen was handed an eligibility ban and that she should be defeated “at the ballot box, not elsewhere”
Forty-three percent of French respondents disagreed with the decision to bar Le Pen from running in the next presidential election, according to a Cluster17 poll. That’s roughly the same share of the electorate that voted for the far-right leader in the second round of the 2022 presidential election.
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