Jean-Paul Garraud, MEP for the French National Rally (RN) party and delegation leader in the Patriots for Europe Group in the European Parliament, has lambasted the conviction of party leader Marine Le Pen, calling it a political death sentence.
On March 31, Le Pen, was convicted of embezzlement. She received a four-year prison sentence, two suspended, and was rendered ineligible to stand for elections for five years regardless of any appeal.
Speaking to Brussels Signal on April 2, Garraud said the instant enforcement of the ineligibility penalty meant her “immediate political death through provisional execution”.
He said the ruling was “completely disproportionate”.
“People shouldn’t think it’s a crooked case where people have pocketed money, have set up mafia-like corruption networks,” he said regarding the case as a whole.
“No, not at all, the court itself indicates in its reasoning that there is no corruption, no fictitious employment and no personal enrichment.”
He stressed it was an old case dating back more than 15 years.
“I was a magistrate and I have held many judicial functions … it’s totally exceptional. I had never seen that … a presumed innocent being sentenced to immediate political death, never,” Garraud said.
In an interview on April 1 with the newspaper Le Parisien, Le Pen said she would take her case to the Constitutional Council and the European Court of Human Rights.
“I will use all possible avenues of appeal. I won’t let it [the sentence] happen,” she said.
By then, the Court of Appeal in France had already said it would accelerate the timeframe of her appeal, aiming to have a ruling ready by 2026, well ahead of the next presidential elections due in 2027.
“It’s a good thing to have a set date, as that’s not usually the case. It also speaks volumes that the Attorney General and the First President of the Paris Court of Appeal issued a rare joint statement, signalling that the hearing will happen fairly soon,” Garraud said.
“This shows that there is a certain emotion, including in the judicial world, regarding this decision.”
Garraud said that the strong reactions worldwide over the conviction of Le Pen “clearly show that the judgment that was rendered is a totally excessive judgment and which encroaches on politics”.
Marine Le Pen’s conviction and accompanying ineligibility to run for president has sparked intense reactions both in France and abroad. https://t.co/PIDIjEWVA7
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) April 1, 2025
He said the judge in her case “moved from the judicial domain, where we discuss guilt or innocence” to the political. In the verdict, it was concluded that Le Pen “must be disqualified, because [otherwise] it would cause a disturbance to the democratic public order”, something Garraud stressed did not exist in French law.
“We are in a domain that is strictly political and not in the domain of judges. So for me, a magistrate, it’s the first time in my life that I criticise a court decision and it’s therefore the exception that proves the rule,” he said.
“We really are in something that has exceeded all limits and that will have multiple, multiple, multiple repercussions.”
Garraud claimed that the judge apparently considered the political views of the RN party in that it opposed the European Union as it was today. He noted the the judge had said the stance of the party was “cynical”.
Garraud said the essence of the case, about the misuse of European Parliamentary assistants, was also problematic.
“There’s a fundamental misunderstanding: a parliamentary assistant is not a European civil servant.
“The European Parliament and the court wrongly assume assistants should only handle MEPs’ duties within Parliament. But MEPs don’t just legislate — they are political figures, and their assistants are politically active too, working both in Parliament and on the ground,” he said.
“Separating these roles is unrealistic, making the accusations deeply flawed.”
He stressed that other political parties, including the Democratic Movement and La France Insoumise, were facing similar issues.
It was “the judiciary that encroaches on political activities that is starting to dictate what should be the work of a parliamentary assistant in relation to their MP, but the judiciary has nothing to do with that”, he said.
“The judicial authority has no business interfering in the way the voters have entrusted us with the task of representing them. Absolutely not,” Garraud added.
He also stressed that “for the offence to be punishable, there must be an intention to commit it”.
“There must be the intention, the intention to harm, the intention to appropriate means, the intention to commit criminal acts… but here, there is no intention to defraud anyone.
“We are [talking about] an accounting problem… an administrative problem originally that should never have led to criminal actions,” he said, “let alone the political death of Marine Le Pen, who should be presumed innocent while she is also the person who has the most chance of becoming president of the Republic, who represents millions, millions of voters.”
Garraud added that what he called the lack of proportionality in this case trampled on a jurisprudence of the Constitutional Council. He said the ruling also referred to a law of 2016, giving it a retroactive element, because the alleged facts went further back in time.
According to the MEP, the party has gained 10,000 new members since the controversial decision because people were “outraged”. He said even people who “cannot be suspected of the slightest leniency towards the National Rally” were highly critical of the ruling.
Garraud insisted the party intentions remained for Le Pen to run for president and for RN leader Jordan Bardella to become prime minister.
“We’re not going to change it , whatever happens … because we are convinced that justice will be rendered in the end,” Garraud concluded.
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— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) April 1, 2025
Claire Lemaire contributed to this reporting.
