Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader and a front-runner to win next year’s presidential election, on Tuesday lost her appeal of an embezzlement conviction, prolonging months of suspense over whether she will run for the presidency.
Though the court upheld the conviction, it shortened a ban on Ms. Le Pen running for office, which reopened the door to a potential campaign. But the decision means that she will have to wear an electronic bracelet that limits her movements — something she has previously said would make a candidacy impossible.
The verdict reverberated through French politics, scrambling the race to replace President Emmanuel Macron and shaking up one of Europe’s largest far-right parties, the National Rally, which is closer to gaining power than at any time in its half-century history.
If Ms. Le Pen had been ruled ineligible to run, she would have immediately ceded her spot to Jordan Bardella, her 30-year-old protégé and the president of the party. Now, with the implications of the ruling not completely clear, she is scheduled to announce her plans in a television interview on Tuesday evening.
At issue in the case was whether Ms. Le Pen, 57, oversaw a scheme to use European funds — intended to subsidize the salaries of aides to the party’s European Parliament members — to pay for other party activities. She denied involvement, though she acknowledged during her appeal that some aides may have unwittingly done party work unrelated to their day jobs.
Ms. Le Pen had previously lashed out against the charges, saying they were part of a political witch hunt and would deprive millions of French people of their votes in the next election. A three-time candidate for president, Ms. Le Pen finished second to Mr. Macron in 2022, winning more than 41 percent of the vote.
What was Ms. Le Pen convicted of?
Ms. Le Pen was found guilty of embezzling funds from the European Parliament between 2009 and 2016, as part of a scheme in which the National Rally channeled several million euros to partisan activities. She was not accused of enriching herself personally, but of misusing public funds.
The appeals court largely upheld a decision made by a lower court in March 2025, though it reduced the amount that the defendants were convicted of embezzling, to roughly $3.2 million from $5 million.
What was her initial punishment?
Ms. Le Pen, a member of the French Parliament, was sentenced last year to four years in prison and fined 100,000 euros, or $114,000. The court suspended two years of her sentence and ruled that the other two could be served under a form of house arrest.
She was also barred from running for any political office for five years, a period that began immediately after her conviction in March 2025.
How was her punishment changed on appeal?
The appeals court reduced her custodial term to three years, two of them suspended, leaving the effective sentence at one year under a form of house arrest, wearing an electronic bracelet, though the details have yet to be clarified.
It also reduced her electoral ban to 45 months, 30 of them suspended — meaning that she is already now allowed to run again for office, the court said.
What happens now?
It’s unclear. Ms. Le Pen had previously said that she would not mount a presidential campaign if she had to wear an electronic bracelet because she could not accept any curtailment of her movements.
In the courtroom, her entourage seemed stunned by the decision, speaking to each other in hushed voices after the decision was made. Ms. Le Pen left the room without talking to the hundreds of French and international journalists waiting outside.
She was expected to clarify her future on Tuesday evening.
Plan B for the National Rally has always been for Mr. Bardella to take Ms. Le Pen’s place. The two have campaigned together across France, and present themselves as a kind of double act, united on policy and tactics.
But Mr. Bardella, a member of the European Parliament, is considered more favorable to business and less antagonistic to other European leaders. He has cited as a model Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, who leads a post-fascist party but has governed with a more moderate style.
What does it mean for French politics?
If Ms. Le Pen surrendered her presidential dreams, it would be the end of an era, not just for France’s most durable far-right leader, but also for a name synonymous with European far-right politics. She took over the National Rally in 2011, inheriting the leadership from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded it in 1972 as the National Front, on a mixture of racism, nativism and antisemitism.
Ms. Le Pen pulled the party away from its most toxic roots, expelling her father and renaming it. She describes herself as a populist — “neither left nor right” — who champions economic nationalism and defending France’s welfare state. She abandoned a push for France to follow Britain out of the European Union. But the party continues to be anti-immigrant and deeply hostile to the E.U.
