Marine Le Pen has cleared the main legal obstacle to a fourth run at the French presidency, and confirmed within hours that she would take it. The Paris Court of Appeal on July 7 cut the disqualification that had barred the National Rally (RN) leader from public office. What the ruling settles is her eligibility. What it leaves open is almost everything about the campaign that follows.
The court confirmed her guilt in the case of the European Parliament assistants but reduced her ineligibility from five years to 45 months, 30 of them suspended. The 15 months of firm disqualification, counted from her first-instance conviction on March 31, 2025, had already elapsed, leaving her free to stand. Her prison term was cut to three years, two suspended, with the final year to be served at home under electronic monitoring, alongside an unchanged €100,000 fine.
HOW THE CASE BEGAN
The affair reaches back more than a decade. Money the European Parliament earmarked to pay the assistants of its members was instead used to fund staff working for the party in France. The bloc’s anti-fraud office raised the alarm in 2015, and after a long investigation the Paris court concluded in March 2025 that an organised system had been in place.
That first ruling was the severe one. It imposed five years’ ineligibility with immediate effect, a mechanism that applied at once regardless of appeal, and so removed the front-runner from the race at a stroke. Le Pen was convicted both as a former MEP and as party president, and the court put the sum she had personally misappropriated at €474,000. The RN itself was fined €2 million, half of it suspended. The party has denied running any such scheme and said it acted in good faith.
The appeal judges took a markedly gentler view, citing the age of the events, the absence of any personal enrichment and the near-decade in which Le Pen had not reoffended. The ineligibility already served, they found, had repaired the harm done to public probity, and a longer ban would cut against the freedom of candidacy on which democratic suffrage rests.
WHAT THE COURTS STILL DECIDE
The legal chapter is not closed. Le Pen has ten clear days, until July 20, to take the case to the Court of Cassation, France’s highest court, and has said she will. Her argument is that the appeal itself suspends the sentence, allowing her to campaign without the electronic tag.
That reading is contested. Several legal specialists warn that a cassation appeal could instead leave the original penalties, the five-year ban included, back in force, and it is unclear whether such a challenge suspends the sentence at all. Le Pen rejects this, insisting the appeal ruling has erased the first judgment.
The timing carries its own weight. Should the challenge fail, the tag could be fitted somewhere between the winter and the spring, precisely as the campaign reaches its decisive weeks.
THE PARTY’S OTHER OPTIONS
Even with Le Pen back in contention, the RN has kept its succession plan in plain view. Party president Jordan Bardella, 30, who has led it since 2022 and headed its lists in the 2024 European and legislative elections, stood ready to run in her place, and she confirmed he would serve as her prime minister.
His own position is not entirely clear. In January his use of European Parliament funds came under review after a complaint by an anti-corruption group, and colleagues have cautioned that broadening the party’s appeal must not cost it the working-class base Le Pen spent years building.
THE ROAD TO 2027
The contest itself is wide open. Emmanuel Macron cannot seek a third consecutive term, and the race for the post-Macron presidency, with a first round on April 18 and a run-off on May 2, 2027, begins with Le Pen leading the early polling after reaching the second round three times in a row.
Elsewhere on the sovereignist Right, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Florian Philippot and François Asselineau have declared, competing for Eurosceptic voters, while the Left again approaches the election without a single candidate.
The case has fed a wider argument, too. Supporters of the RN, and observers abroad, have cast the prosecution as an attempt to settle at the courtroom what belongs at the ballot box, pointing to the annulled presidential election in Romania as a parallel. The March 2025 verdict drew condemnation from US President Donald Trump and vice-president JD Vance, who called it politically motivated. Opponents counter that no politician stands above the law and that voters are entitled to know a candidate’s record.
For now, Le Pen is back in a race she has fought three times before. Whether she reaches the ballot as a free candidate or a monitored one, though, still rests with a court that has yet to rule.
