The French Right will survive the banning of Marine Le Pen

Telegraph

31-03-2025

Marine Le Pen, hitherto the favourite to succeed Emmanuel Macron as French President, has been barred from standing for public office for five years with immediate effect after being found guilty of embezzlement to fund her party. For French politics, this is an earthquake.
Her angry reaction – storming out of court before the end of the two-hour judgement – indicates that the sentence is a devastating blow to the leader of the National Rally, who has been leading the polls for the 2027 presidential election. Although she will appeal, her candidacy is effectively over.
There will be a widespread sense of injustice across France – not only on the Right, but also on the far-Left, which is equally hostile to unelected judges meddling in politics. Jordan Bardella, her deputy in the National Rally, declared that, while Le Pen had been 'unjustly condemned, it is French democracy that has been executed'. Many will dismiss the trial and verdict as an establishment stitch-up – although two former presidents, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, have been convicted of corruption, which is endemic in French politics.
Yet the gravity of the offence and what the judges called the 'cynicism' of Le Pen, who masterminded the systematic embezzlement of €4 million of EU taxpayers' money, left the court little choice but to impose the harshest penalty available. Her two-year jail sentence has been suspended pending appeal, but the lengthy judgement, solidly grounded in legal argument, will be difficult to overturn.
Marine Le Pen has worked hard to detoxify the movement she inherited from her father Jean Marie – an anti-Semite who championed Pétain and the Vichy tradition. She has been winning the battle of ideas, too: her hardline policies on migration and Islam are now government policy.
After the family psychodrama of Marine Le Pen kicking her father out of the party, while seeing off a challenge from her own niece, this trial may be the dénouement. Is this the end of the Le Pen clan's grip on the French Right, which has endured for over half a century?
Still, Le Pen is nothing if not a fighter. At 56, she is certainly not ready to abandon what she sees as her destiny to lead France. She will draw strength from the example of the septuagenarian Donald Trump, who used his courtroom convictions to present himself as a victim of the 'deep state'.
Waiting in the wings to replace Le Pen is Bardella, the 29-year-old dauphin of the National Rally. He has been slavishly loyal to her so far, but she admits that he is ready to step into her shoes.
Bardella recently published a bestselling memoir of growing up in an urban slum. Given his youth, there are bound to be doubts about his ability to win the presidential election, but unless the verdict can be overturned the National Rally has little choice but to elevate the dauphin to the throne.
The party's platform for 2027 envisaged Le Pen standing as President and appointing Bardella as her Prime Minister. The irony is that her long march through the institutions may now end in curtains for Marine Le Pen – but with the son of immigrants installed in the Élysée Palace.