French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has spent her political life inching towards the presidency.
Efforts to moderate the party her father Jean-Marie Le Pen founded, to make it more palatable to mainstream conservative voters, had been bearing fruit.
Her planned fourth run for president in 2027 was to be the culmination of all that work. Le Pen was seen as having a credible chance of winning, a result that would have upended both French and European politics.
That march towards the Élysée Palace appears to have been stopped by a French court ruling that will have huge ramifications.
A sentence handed down on Monday, in a trial over the misuse of European Parliament funding, bars Le Pen from running for public office for five years. Her party, the Eurosceptic, anti-immigration National Rally, criticised the decision as an attack on democracy.
Le Pen and several others were convicted of embezzling EU funds, by siphoning off more than €4 million in funding from Brussels for National Rally operations in France.
For more than a decade Le Pen has been the face of National Rally, and one of the standard-bearers of Europe’s growing far-right movement. She had taken over the party, which was then called the National Front, from her father in 2011. As leader she sought to detoxify its brand as an extremist party, to win more moderate voters.
That strategy worked. Le Pen’s party ate into the support of the centre-right Republicans, to become the biggest force on the right of France’s political system.
National Rally made significant gains in snap parliamentary elections last year, but fell well short of a majority some thought they might come close to securing. Alongside its hard line on immigration, the party has campaigned on bread-and-butter issues such as bringing down the cost of living.
Opinion polls suggest National Rally would have enough support to make the run-off in a presidential election, where the top two candidates from an initial round of voting go head to head to decide the winner.
After two terms, French president Emmanuel Macron cannot stand in the next presidential race. His weather-beaten centrist coalition has yet to settle on a successor.
The third bloc in French politics, the left, is divided between the more radical France Unbowed party, led by the divisive firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and the centre-left Socialist Party.
As well as striking a potentially fatal blow to Le Pen’s presidential ambitions, the court sentence leaves National Rally in turmoil.
Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s protege and president of the party, is her most likely replacement on the ballot. There had already been speculation about Bardella’s rising star potentially eclipsing Le Pen in the run-up to 2027. However, the sudden opportunity to supplant his political mentor might have come too soon for the 29-year-old politician.
Bardella will probably have to fight off challengers from elsewhere in the National Rally ranks, who will claim he lacks the experience needed to win over a majority of French voters. Locking in the backing of Le Pen will be key for whoever wants to take her place.
In the long run, the court’s decision – if it is not overturned on appeal before the next presidential vote – may fuel the further rise of National Rally.
The far-right party has portrayed itself as the “real” voice of the French people, fighting against the out-of-touch “elites”, such as Macron. The conviction of Le Pen and the court ruling effectively barring her from standing in the next presidential race will certainly become a big part of that narrative.
