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Marine Le Pen walked into a Paris courtroom on Tuesday still convicted, but no longer barred from the job she has chased three times. An appeals court upheld her conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds, then softened the punishment enough to reopen her path to the 2027 presidential election.
The judges confirmed that Le Pen's party siphoned €2.8 million (about $3.2 million) from the European Parliament by paying party workers with money meant for parliamentary assistants. That core finding — embezzlement of EU funds — stands.
What changed was the sentence. The court handed down a 45-month ban from public office but suspended 30 months of it. The remaining 15 months were backdated to the original March 2025 verdict and have already elapsed. On paper, Le Pen is eligible again. She also received a three-year detention with two years suspended, leaving one year of house arrest under an electronic tag. Her lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, said he was "partially" satisfied, welcoming what he called a "considerable shift" on the ban.
The ruling creates an awkward bind. The office ban that would have ended her career has effectively expired, yet the house arrest lands squarely on her ability to campaign. Le Pen has repeatedly said she would not stand if she could not travel and campaign freely. She now has the option to change her mind — and a year to weigh whether an ankle tag is compatible with a national campaign.
The case was never really about French domestic spending. It turned on European Parliament money — allowances meant for accredited assistants in Brussels and Strasbourg that prosecutors said were quietly redirected to keep the party running at home. That makes it part of a wider reckoning over how members use the Parliament's generous staffing budgets, and it lands on the largest French delegation in the chamber. Waiting in the wings is Jordan Bardella, Le Pen's 30-year-old protégé and party president, long treated as the fallback candidate if she were ruled out.
For the Rassemblement National, the verdict removes a legal cliff-edge and replaces it with a political puzzle: run their proven vote-winner under the visible constraint of a tag, or hand the 2027 ticket to Bardella and test whether the movement travels without its figurehead. For the EU, the message is blunter. The bloc's most consequential far-right party heads toward a pivotal French election with its leadership still unsettled — and its signature legal fight rooted, at bottom, in the misuse of European funds.
