Le Pen is not mightier: What the French far-right leader’s ban from politics means for her movement — and for the Kremlin

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The verdict and the fallout

On March 31, a Paris court convicted Marine Le Pen of misusing public funds during her time as a Member of the European Parliament. She received a four-year sentence — two years suspended, two under house arrest with an electronic tag — along with a €100,000 fine. Most notably, the court banned her from seeking public office for five years. While Le Pen’s prison sentence and fine won’t take effect until the appeals process is complete, the political ban kicked in immediately. Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the far-right movement’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, will remain in the National Assembly until her term ends, but unless the Appeals Court overturns the ruling, she will not be allowed to run in the 2027 presidential election.

Background: the court case against Marine Le Pen

According to the court’s ruling, Marine Le Pen and her National Rally colleagues set up a system that allowed them to use “the budget allocated to each Member of the European Parliament (EP) for parliamentary assistance” while saving party funds — in other words, they redirected funds designated for EP functions towards domestic political efforts. “At the center of this system since 2009 has been Marine Le Pen, who played a decisive and authoritative role in a mechanism created by her father, in which she had participated since 2004,” explained the presiding judge.

The court found Le Pen guilty of misappropriating funds intended to pay her assistants and of covering up “embezzlement committed by other Members of the European Parliament.” While the court ruled that National Front members did not personally profit from the scheme, it enriched the party itself, creating an “unequal playing field” and disadvantaging other parties.

The decision sparked outrage both in France — not only among Le Pen’s supporters — and also abroad. Marine Le Pen denies any wrongdoing and called the verdict politically motivated, describing it as a “witch hunt.” U.S. President Donald Trump echoed that sentiment, writing on Truth Social that the case against Le Pen represented “another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going so far as to put that Opponent in prison.” Trump dismissed the charges against Le Pen as “minor,” comparing them to “a bookkeeping error” that she likely knew nothing about — one that was now being used to stop her “on the verge of a great victory.”

Trump was backed by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance: “Leading in some polls, and over an incredibly minor charge — that implicated, by the way, her staff, not Marine Le Pen herself — they’re trying to throw her in prison and throw her off the ballot. That’s not democracy,” Vance said of the case.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called the ruling “a violation of democratic norms,” claiming that “our observations in European capitals suggest that they have no qualms about stepping beyond the bounds of democracy during political processes.”

On the day of Le Pen’s conviction, Viktor Orbán posted on X (formerly Twitter) in French: “Je suis Marine!” The Hungarian Prime Minister, along with several other European allies of the right-wing populist movement, contributed a video message to the National Rally’s gathering in Paris on April 6 — the first weekend after the verdict — voicing his support for the party’s leader. The rally itself, however, was sparsely attended. According to police estimates, only around six thousand people showed up to support Le Pen — despite her currently holding the highest personal approval rating of any French politician, according to polls.

The Court of Appeal of Paris has announced that it will rule on Le Pen’s case in the summer of 2026. In theory, the fact that the legal process is not finished leaves open the possibility that Le Pen could in fact appear on the presidential ballot in 2027. However, even if the Appeals Court overturns the initial verdict, prosecutors are very likely to file a cassation appeal — and there is little chance such a challenge could be resolved before the 2027 election, meaning Marine Le Pen’s political career may well be coming to an end.

Her father's daughter

Marine Le Pen is the youngest of three daughters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right French politician who in 1972 founded the National Front — the precursor to the National Rally. Despite Marine’s efforts to assert independence, much of her political rise has been built on the legacy she inherited from her father.

Jean-Marie Le Pen began his career by combining politics with military service. In 1956, after spending several years in the Foreign Legion in Indochina, he became one of the youngest members of the country’s National Assembly via the populist Union for the Defense of Tradesmen and Artisans party. Shortly after entering parliament, Le Pen took leave from his legislative duties to fight in another colonial war — this time in Algeria. There, he served as an intelligence officer and, according to investigations carried out by French journalists, personally took part in torture.

He started the National Front in 1972 with the help of four co-founders: Pierre Bousquet and Léon Gautier, both former SS soldiers; François Duprat, a member of the neo-fascist New Order movement; and Roger Holeindre, a former member of the far-right terrorist Secret Armed Organization, which fought to maintain French control over Algeria. The party’s logo — red and blue “flames” — matched the colors of the French flag. According to several historians, the emblem closely resembled that of the Italian Social Movement, a neo-fascist party created by supporters of Mussolini.

For a long time, the National Front was considered a fringe force in French politics. Its members were first elected to the European Parliament in 1984 and to the French National Assembly in 1986. At that time, France briefly used a proportional representation system, electing deputies via party lists rather than individual constituencies — a system that allowed the National Front to win 35 seats in one go. Until the elections of 2022, when the National Rally captured 89 seats, that remained the movement’s record.

Jean-Marie Le Pen’s personal political high point came in the 2002 presidential election, when he made it to the second round and won 17.8% of the vote. Over the course of his career, he ran for president five times, placing fourth in four of those races.

Despite his modest electoral results, Jean-Marie Le Pen gradually rose to national prominence — largely thanks to repeated scandals. He faced legal action a total of 25 times — for justifying war crimes, denying crimes against humanity, issuing public insults, inciting hatred, and making antisemitic, racist, and homophobic remarks. He never renounced his views or issued apologies. On the contrary, he was tried six times for saying that “gas chambers were just a detail of history,” returning to the claim again and again and standing by it each time.

Every attempt by party members to “normalize” the image of the National Front met with its founder’s resistance and usually ended in internal splits and the departure of “moderates.” In 1998, for instance, after Le Pen assaulted a Socialist Party candidate during a campaign, a number of his former allies left the party. These included his eldest daughter, Marie-Caroline Le Pen. That same year, his youngest daughter, Marine, joined the party staff.

As the daughter of an ultranationalist, populist politician, Marine Le Pen encountered politics very early in life. In 1976, when Marine was just eight years old, unknown assailants planted a bomb at the family’s home during the night, and it was by sheer luck that no one was killed in the resulting explosion. Marine Le Pen has often said in interviews that the attack had a profound impact on her: “It took that terrible night for me to understand that my father was involved in politics. And it was then, at a doll-playing age, that I realized something terrible and incomprehensible to me: my father was not treated like other people, and we weren’t treated like everyone else.”

Marine Le Pen joined the National Front as soon as she turned 18, though she initially stayed away from active party life. Instead, she earned a law degree from the prestigious Panthéon-Assas University and began working as a lawyer, though her legal career was not especially successful. In 1998, she left private practice to head the National Front’s legal department.

Inside the party, Le Pen’s youngest daughter worked to suppress dissent and eliminate her father’s rivals, but she also sought to soften the party’s public image. For example, during the 2002 presidential campaign, she helped craft her father’s image, aiming to make him appear less aggressive.

From antisemitic slogans to anti-immigrant rhetoric

In 2011, with the backing of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine was elected leader of the National Front. Her father, the party’s founder, remained honorary president and hoped to retain control. But in 2015, after yet another statement about gas chambers, his daughter succeeded in having him expelled from the movement. Three years later, she changed the party’s name — and even its logo — rebranding it as the “National Rally.”

After Jean-Marie Le Pen’s death in January 2025, Marine Le Pen said that she would “never forgive herself” for expelling her father and called his antisemitic remarks “provocations” that didn’t warrant prosecution. Still, she herself has made more than a few controversial comments. Marine was taken to court, for example, after comparing Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation of France. As a result, many observers see the break with her father — and, by extension, with his radical, near-fascist past — as little more than a strategic maneuver.

Like other far-right movements in Europe, the National Rally caught the Kremlin’s attention. Moscow has sought to build an international coalition of populists and nationalists, and in Le Pen’s case, it achieved unprecedented success.

Putin’s French friend

Since the early 2010s, in parallel with Marine Le Pen’s campaign to “de-demonize” her party, she and her colleagues have been actively working to clean up the image of the Russian government. In 2011, while preparing for her first presidential campaign, Madame Le Pen gave an interview in which she said it would be more beneficial for France to “pivot toward Russia,” as the two countries shared “many common interests, both in terms of civilization and strategy.” According to Le Pen, criticism of Russia in the French media is the result of directives from the United States, meaning only European politicians of particular courage can advocate for closer ties with Moscow.

“I believe that Russia is not active enough in building ties with those European politicians and players who, like me, sympathize with it and are ready to promote this stance,” Le Pen said. Towards the end of the interview, she admitted that she was “to some extent impressed by Vladimir Putin,” who “has the character and vision for the future needed to secure the prosperity that Russia deserves.”

In her 2012 presidential platform, Le Pen proposed forming a “Paris–Berlin–Moscow trilateral alliance,” a message that was certainly heard in Moscow. In 2013, she visited Russia for the first time and met with francophone Sergei Naryshkin — then the speaker of the State Duma, now the head of the country’s Foreign Intelligence Service. Le Pen told Naryshkin of her outrage that “the European Union has effectively declared a Cold War on Russia.” Other members of Le Pen’s inner circle would soon follow, including National Front MP Marion Maréchal-Le Pen and foreign policy advisor Aymeric Chauprade.

By 2014, support for Russian interests had moved beyond visits and admiration. Representatives of France’s far right traveled to observe the “referendum” that resulted in Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, as well as similar votes in the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics.”

The day after the mock referendum in Crimea, Marine Le Pen recognized its results as legitimate. According to information from hacked correspondence of Russian officials, she did so at the Kremlin’s request. A month later, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s new microparty, Cotelec, received a €2 million loan from an offshore company in Cyprus that was allegedly linked to the Russian authorities. The intermediary in the deal was Aymeric Chauprade, Le Pen’s advisor who had observed the referendum in Crimea. There is no information suggesting the money was ever repaid.

In the fall of 2014, it emerged that the National Front itself had received a €9 million loan — officially, not from Russia, but from the First Czech-Russian Bank, with mediation by MEP Jean-Luc Schaffhauser and Russian Senator Alexander Babakov, one of the Kremlin’s foreign policy operatives. At the time, Marine Le Pen denied receiving money from Russian structures in exchange for any form of support or services rendered, explaining that she had to borrow abroad because French banks were reluctant to lend to her party.

After the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, Marine Le Pen continued to express support for the Russian government, accusing the European Union of provoking the conflict, calling for the lifting of sanctions against Russia, repeating that the people of Crimea had voluntarily voted to join Russia, and explaining that Crimea had historically been part of the Russian Empire. Deputies from her party, in turn, continued to travel to Russia — and to Crimea. Hacked correspondence from Timur Prokopenko, an official in Russia’s Presidential Directorate for Domestic Policy, showed that the Kremlin was making great efforts to involve Le Pen in legitimizing the annexation of Crimea.

In 2017, during her second presidential campaign, Marine Le Pen again traveled to Moscow. It was an unprecedented visit given that the Russian authorities had traditionally avoided directly supporting any foreign candidate during elections. This time, however, the French politician met personally with Vladimir Putin, who openly favored her over Emmanuel Macron while offering incongruous assurances that he did not intend to interfere in French political affairs.

During the debates, Le Pen actively promoted a fake story about Macron’s offshore accounts — one that had been planted by the GRU — but it didn’t help her. In the second round, the familiar French political tradition — of centrists from the left and right uniting to defeat an extremist candidate — kicked in.

Nevertheless, Le Pen’s less-than-transparent support from Moscow appears to have continued. In 2017, her party received €8 million from French businessman Laurent Fouché, who is allegedly linked to the Russian authorities, and in 2022, it received €10 million from Hungary’s MKB Bank, whose shareholders include businessmen close to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In the meantime, in 2019, the Czech-Russian Bank shut down, and Le Pen’s debt was transferred to the company Aviazapchast, headed by former employees of Russian intelligence agencies. In 2020, the far-right party reached a settlement with the creditor and postponed loan repayment until the end of 2028. Then, suddenly, in 2023, National Rally announced that the loan had been repaid early.

By that time, it should be noted, Le Pen’s position on Russia had undergone, albeit temporarily, a noticeable shift. In 2022, she condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying that with it Putin had crossed a “red line.” Yet like her father, she chose not to burn her bridges completely. “Russia will always remain a neighbor to Europe. History has shown that yesterday's enemies can become tomorrow's allies. Without fanning the flames, we will be able to end Russia's invasion of Ukraine through diplomatic means,” she stated just over a month into Russia’s full-scale invasion. Even after the events of 2022, the party still employed a Russian-born dual citizen whom French intelligence has identified as a possible “conduit” of Russian influence, and it has not distanced itself from the former observers of various Russian pseudo-referendums and sham elections.

Still, in an effort to combat the party’s public image as a Russian agent, in 2023 members of the National Rally initiated an investigation by a parliamentary commission on foreign interference. However, they were unable to clear their name: the commission's report once again highlighted the lack of transparency in the party's credit history and the “privileged” relationship between Le Pen's party and the Kremlin. She described the rhetorical support that the National Rally received from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 2024 parliamentary elections as a “provocation,” equating it to electoral interference.

Embezzler of the European Parliament’s funds

The French system for financing political activities imposes strict budget limits on smaller parties. After its success in 1986, The National Front had managed to elect no more than one deputy to the 577-seat National Assembly in any election until 2017. That year, the National Front made its first breakthrough, winning seven seats. Then, in 2022, the newly renamed National Rally achieved significant success, securing 89 seats, and in 2024, during the snap elections called by Macron, it increased that total to 119 seats.

Background

Political parties in France are funded from two sources:

The state budget. The amount of funding depends on the results of parliamentary elections: one part of the funding is based on the number of voters who cast a ballot for the party in the first round, while the other part is based on the number of deputies and senators who made it into parliament.
Private sources: membership fees, contributions from the salaries of deputies, voluntary donations, and so on. The amount of private donations in France is legally limited: an individual may not donate more than 7,500 euros per year to political parties. Donations from companies to political parties are prohibited in France.

For many years, the National Front compensated for its lack of funding not only through dubious loans but also by achieving relative success in European elections. Each elected Member of the European Parliament (MEP) received an annual €20,000- €30,000 to cover the costs of assistants' work, but the National Front (and some other European deputies) instead hired party staff — unrelated to the work of the European Parliament — on contracts as assistants. Le Pen allowed her MEPs to have only one assistant, with the remaining funds being transferred to the party.

Marine Le Pen first became a Member of the European Parliament in 2004, along with six other party colleagues. It was from 2004 onwards, according to findings from the French court, that the far-right party's deputies began using European Parliament funds for party purposes.

The violations became known for the first time in 2013, when Mediapart reported that Marine Le Pen had hired two vice-presidents of the National Front as parliamentary assistants: Florian Philippot and Louis Aliot. At the same time, Aliot was Marine Le Pen's partner, and the couple did not hide this fact.

However, the official investigation only began in 2015, when it was revealed that this practice was systematic and affected not just individual deputies, but the entire party.

The “European savings” system allowed Le Pen’s movement not only to make payments to specialists working for the party in France, but also to individuals close to the Le Pen family. For example, the salary of a parliamentary assistant was once paid to Jean-Marie Le Pen's bodyguard, his personal secretary, and his butler. Marine Le Pen's personal assistant, Catherine Gize, as well as her sister — Yann Le Pen, who worked for the National Front — were listed as assistants in the European Parliament.

Thus, taxpayers' money not only went to support the party, giving it a competitive advantage, but also funded inflated salaries for people who were closely connected to the party leadership and the Le Pen family. “These fictitious contracts also financed the maintenance of a very comfortable lifestyle, with equally comfortable salaries for close and loyal allies,” the prosecutor's statement read.

Exclusion from politics for this type of offense is a common practice in France. Just a few years ago, the same thing happened to former Prime Minister François Fillon, who employed his wife. However, rather than accepting responsibility, Marine Le Pen has chosen to compare herself to legitimate victims of political persecution — figures like Alexei Navalny, Ekrem İmamoğlu, and even Martin Luther King — saying she intends to fight to the end. Nevertheless, only a few thousand people showed up at her first rally following the verdict.

A blessing in disguise for the far right?

Marine Le Pen’s personal setback may prove as beneficial to the National Rally as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s dismissal from the National Front once did. Although Marine boasts the highest approval rating of any politician in France, most people polled after the court's ruling are either indifferent to it or support the decision. In their opinion, politicians who use public funds for political purposes should and must be stripped of the right to participate in elections.

At the same time, only 30% of those polled say that only Le Pen alone is capable of leading the French far-right to victory. Since 2022, the charismatic young Jordan Bardella, has been the formal leader of the National Rally, and 67% of those surveyed see him as the only possible successor to Le Pen.

Currently, Bardella's electoral rating is only slightly lower than hers — by about half a percent — and the 29-year-old, who does not carry the negative baggage that Le Pen and her father have accumulated over nearly six decades, may have significant room to grow politically. Recall how, in 2022, politicians from across the spectrum — left-wing, centrist, and even some right-wing figures — urged voters not to support Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election. Clarity will come closer to the elections, but Bardella might not face the same level of opposition as his right-wing predecessors have.

Of course, Marine Le Pen still has the option of appealing the verdict, potentially winning in the subsequent cassation court. The National Rally is clearly considering all possibilities, and, as French media has pointed out, has yet to begin the process of finding a replacement for its presidential candidate. After all, it might be too soon to bid farewell to Le Pen.