On Monday, a criminal court in France found Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement, and barred her from running for the French Presidency in 2027. Le Pen, the far-right leader of the National Rally, the political party formerly known as the National Front, had been leading first-round Presidential election polls. The National Rally is now likely to run Jordan Bardella, a twenty-nine-year-old member of the European Parliament who, since 2022, has served as the Party’s president. Bardella claimed on X that the court’s verdict represented the “execution of French democracy,” a sentiment shared by far-right politicians across the globe, from Viktor Orbán to J. D. Vance. Although Le Pen was not accused of profiting from the embezzlement, the court found her guilty of overseeing a scheme that enriched her party with European Union money.
To help understand the scandal and what the court’s decision means for France, I recently spoke by phone with Cécile Alduy, a professor of French studies at Stanford and an expert on the French far right. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether this decision upholds or undercuts French democracy, how the far right may change under a new leader, and what the second Trump Administration could mean for French politics going forward.
How do you understand this decision? Do you see this as a French court following the law, or an attempt to apply a double standard to someone who many people feel is a threat to French democracy?
From all the documents that have been shared across this investigation, and in comparison with other cases of embezzlement trials in France, in my opinion, it’s very clear that this was just the court applying the law. And this is not the first case in France like this. There have been other trials about the embezzlement of funds distributed by the European Union for parliamentary aides. Even the political party of the current French Prime Minister, François Bayrou, has come under investigation for similar charges. And in recent months some mayors of small cities in France have been condemned to ineligibility because of embezzlement. So it’s not at all something uncommon. It’s the magnitude of the amount that has been embezzled, over so many years, and the systemic nature of it that is unique. This was millions of Euros that had been used by the National Front that were supposed to be paying the salaries of parliamentary aides but, in effect, have been proven by the investigations to have been used by the political party for its own functioning.
So just to explain to Americans how this works: a country in the E.U., like France, gets a certain amount of money for—
No, it’s not exactly this way. The European Parliament gives some funds to each European representative so that they can hire parliamentary aides that assist in compiling dossiers on specific policies that they want to be implemented, that organize their agendas and do things like buy train tickets. And the European Parliament gives the same amount of money for each deputy to do their jobs through the hiring of a parliamentary aide. The French National Front used that budget to hire, indeed, parliamentary aides, but they would rarely, if ever, show up at the European Parliament. In fact, they worked directly for the National Front in Paris, or sometimes locally in France. What’s been proven by the investigation is that people were hired through this budget but never worked for the purpose of the job description.
This decision raises a number of interesting questions about democracy, both in France and in general, but maybe the first is whether candidates who are convicted of crimes should be allowed to run for office. My understanding is that France is a little different than, say, the United States, that its politicians have been banned from running for office with some regularity. That this is something that happened to François Fillon, a former French Prime Minister. What was that case, and how would you describe the French approach to this issue?
You have to be convicted to be prevented from running. But there are two different aspects to this question. One is public opinion and the perception of corruption in those cases that could be damaging to candidates’ images and prevent them from even being nominated once a scandal erupts. This was the case of François Fillon. He had not been convicted yet. The scandal about him providing his wife with a fictitious job that was remunerated by the French parliament erupted during the Presidential campaign in 2017. It was so scandalous that he had no chance of, you know, winning. He was convicted afterwards. It took a long time, actually, for the trial to be over.
Then you have the cases of candidates who are convicted by justice. And the law since 2016 has opened up the possibility that any candidate who has been convicted for embezzlement of public funds is immediately ineligible, and cannot run. Most of what Marine Le Pen did was before 2016. But the law left open the potential that if you are convicted for embezzlement you can be prevented from exerting any public office or running for public office. But you need the conviction to actually be enforced. So until today, Marine Le Pen was a candidate who could have won even if there was a scandal, because her base was not very sensitive to this kind of corruption, especially if it was taking money from the European Parliament. Her base is pretty much anti-European Union. So there is a distinction between the perception of these scandals and the legal conviction in this case.
Right, the political aspect is probably pretty similar to the United States, where Trump’s base doesn’t really care if he is convicted of a crime. But the difference is that even though he was convicted of a crime he could still run. Just to clarify about Fillon, though: he was banned from running, but that decision took a while to come down, after 2017 and his stepping aside?
Yeah, exactly. So this was way after the 2017 election. That year, he ran in the first round of the election but didn’t reach the runoff. And then he was dismissed by his own political party. It was three years later that he was officially condemned and barred from running again.
And I gather something similar happened to the former President Nicolas Sarkozy, too.
Yeah. This conversation is really giving a terrible image of French politicians. But, yeah, Sarkozy has like a dozen different legal suits on him at the moment.
There have been a lot of comments from across the political spectrum in France, including from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left leader, basically saying that this decision deprives voters of the right of being able to choose their President. But I interpreted a lot of the statements that I’ve seen as not simply saying French law shouldn’t preclude convicted criminals from seeking office but something stronger, i.e., that this is the French system picking on Marine Le Pen in some way. So do you think that that is going to be a widespread feeling in France, even if you think the court was following the law here correctly or fairly?
This is exactly what Marine Le Pen herself and her party are proclaiming—that it’s political retaliation. Honestly, I don’t really think that is the case, since there were already trials for similar cases across the political spectrum, as you just underlined, including Mélenchon, which is probably why he’s not very sympathetic to the justice system. In this case, I think there are two different aspects to this. There are politicians or even citizens who might think, indeed, it reshuffles the political spectrum in such a huge way, because she was the primary contender for the next Presidential election, that it leaves a vacuum. And there is a sense that it has an impact on democracy. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s wrong, though. It says that, well, there’s something called the separation of powers, and the judicial power exerted its authority, and every citizen is responsible under the law, and the law applies equally to everyone. But there’s an effect on democracy in how this is going to be played out.
