Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said Tuesday that she will run in France’s presidential election next year, hours after a Paris appeals court upheld her conviction for misusing European Union funds.
The court shortened her ban on running for elected office. However, it ruled she must wear an electronic ankle tag for a year — which Le Pen had said would rule her out of a presidential run because it would make campaigning difficult and undermine her credibility.
But in a prime-time interview on France’s TF1 TV, she announced that she was a “candidate in the presidential election” and the French people would have the last word.
Le Pen, 57, added that she would appeal the ruling to France’s highest court, the Cour de Cassation. Until that court delivered its own ruling, she said she would not need to wear an electronic tag during the campaign.
This came despite the appeals court ruling that she would wear one for a year. The Court of Cassation has previously said that, if asked to review the case, it would seek to issue a ruling before the 2027 presidential election.
Le Pen, who has run for president in France thrice, was banned from holding public office for five years in March last year after a court found her guilty of embezzling 1.4 million euros ($1.6 million) in European Parliament money to hire two high-ranking members of her party, then known as the National Front, as parliamentary assistants.
E.U. lawmakers are provided funds to cover expenses and the salaries of parliamentary assistants, but are not allowed to use them for party activities.
Investigators said they later discovered these hires made between 2004 and 2016 were not isolated cases but part of a wider system of “fake jobs.”
Le Pen, who came second to President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and again in 2022, was handed a four-year jail term, two years of which were suspended, and hit with a fine of 100,000 euros ($114,355). She was allowed to serve the other two in home detention with an electronic tag.
Her party was also fined 2 million euros ($2.29 million), half of which was suspended.
At the time, Le Pen claimed that her party was victim to a “witch hunt,” and she denounced the outcome as a “democratic scandal.”
Her party, which changed its name to National Rally in 2018, was ahead in the polls at the time and she was widely seen as the likely front-runner to succeed Macron in the 2027 election until last year’s ruling.
Some supporters sent death threats to Bénédicte de Perthuis, the judge in her case, according to Agence France-Presse.
Having argued at her first trial that the money had been used legitimately, at her appeal she claimed that the party had “absolutely no sense of doing anything wrong whatsoever.”
Le Pen had stepped down as National Rally president in 2021 to focus on the presidential race, handing the role down to Jordan Bardella, the party’s current leader and a longtime admirer of his former boss.
In a lengthy post on X on Monday praising Le Pen, Bardella, 30, said his support for his predecessor, who inspired him to join the National Rally at the age of 16, was “total.”
“Nothing can justify Marine Le Pen being excluded from the choice of the French people and prevented from presenting herself before them,” he wrote.
