France’s hard-Right candidate Marine Le Pen has accused Europe of waging a war over energy with Russia and vowed to stop funding Ukraine should she win next year’s presidential election.
Ms Le Pen, who is a front-runner in the polls, pledged to stop bilateral aid for Kyiv within six months, saying France can no longer afford it.
She claimed the ‘honest thing’ the EU should do would be to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky it ‘can’t manage’ to financially support his cause any more.
Le Pen found guilty but it’s her decision not to run, not the court’s
The verdict is in: guilty, but eligible. Le Pen’s ban was shortened enough to let her run in the 2027 presidential election, *IF* she decides to campaign wearing a court-ordered ankle tag for a year. Judges just handed her a tough choice. The call is now hers, not theirs.
— Michel Rose (@MichelReuters) July 7, 2026
French populist leader Marine Le Pen has stated that if the appeal against her five-year election ban is unsuccessful, she will step aside and support her deputy, Jordan Bardella, in the race to replace President Emmanuel Macron.
France’s Council of State has rejected the National Rally de facto leader Marine Le Pen’s appeal against her immediate ineligibility, which was handed down in March.
The case revolves around the employment of MEP assistants by the Front National – now National Rally (RN).
Marine Le Pen has asked Jordan Bardella, her top lieutenant, to prepare to replace her as presidential candidate for the hard-right National Rally if the appeal court upholds a bar on her entering the 2027 election.
The 56-year-old populist, who is far ahead in the polling in her planned fourth run for the French presidency, was acknowledging for the first time that her conviction in March for embezzling EU funds could block her path to the Élysée Palace.
France’s far-right National Rally (RN) leader Marine Le Pen has called a court ruling banning her from running for office for five years a “witch hunt”.
“I won’t give up,” she told thousands of flag-waving supporters in Place Vauban, close to the Eiffel Tower in Paris on Sunday.
She was on Monday found guilty of helping to embezzle €2.9m (£2.5m) of EU funds between 2004 and 2016 for use by her party. Le Pen has appealed.
At the rally on Sunday she claimed the ruling was a “political decision”, adding: “We are not asking to be above the law, but to not be below the law.”
Marine Le Pen speaking at the rally in Paris
“I would like to echo the words of MLK when he talked of the American people deprived of votes”
“We will fight on in a disciplined & dignified way – we will not give up to the despair of our adversaries” pic.twitter.com/WioWKeORCR
— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) April 6, 2025
France’s far right is hoping for a massive public show of support tomorrow in a “people’s protest” against Marine Le Pen being barred from standing for president in 2027.
The Rassemblement National (National Rally – RN) party called for a nationwide demonstration under the banner “Save Democracy” after Le Pen was found guilty in a €4m (£3.4m) embezzlement trial.
Leftwing and centrist parties have also called for separate gatherings in and around the capital in support of the law being enforced – as well to back the court, and judges who have been subject to death threats requiring police protection.
French Left condemns march for democracy as “fascist threat”
France’s right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) has called for a demonstration in Paris on Sunday, April 6th, in support of Marine Le Pen. The planned protest—which follows Le Pen’s conviction, prison sentence, and disqualification from running in the 2027 presidential election—has provoked the anger of the Left, which called it a “fascist” threat. Despite this, the RN, supported by a public statement from Donald Trump, claims that its membership has exploded in the space of a few days.
Free Le Pen! pic.twitter.com/mtx3ndQ10r
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 4, 2025
It’s official, the bromance between Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron is over. It had always been a rocky relationship but on Thursday it ended in a spectacular fashion.
The French president, reacting to Trump’s decision to impose 20 per cent tariffs on all EU products, announced: ‘Investments to come or investments announced in recent weeks should be suspended until things are clarified with the United States.’
A French criminal court’s disqualification of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French populist party, the Rassemblement National, from running for office for five years, along with a sentence of four years’ imprisonment—meaning two years under effective house arrest—and a fine of $110,000 has, not surprisingly, acted like a stick poked into a hornet’s nest. The disqualification means that Le Pen will not be able to run for the presidency, which she had a reasonable chance of winning, in 2027.
An insurgent politician, spoiling to cause an upset and topple the establishment, removed from the ballot paper following corruption charges. No, I’m not talking about Erdogan’s Turkey, or some other faraway autocracy, but nominally democratic France, where a court has just upended the next presidential election.
U.S. President Donald Trump said the conviction of Marine Le Pen and her exclusion from the presidential election was a “very serious matter”.
“This is a really big deal,” said the U.S. president on Monday when asked about Le Pen’s conviction yesterday, which saw her sentenced to two years in prison and two years of house arrest, in addition to a complete ban from running for office for five years.
The Paris Criminal Court verdict is an earthquake that is likely to transform the French political landscape.
Marine Le Pen, 56, who was the frontrunner for the 2027 presidential election, has been knocked out of the race at a stroke of a judge’s pen.
Her long-term plan to win power by making her hard-right National Rally party less toxic and more acceptable to mainstream voters has been reduced to rubble.
The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has been barred from running for president in 2027 after a court found her guilty of a vast system of embezzlement of European parliament funds and banned her from running for public office with immediate effect.
The decision was a political earthquake for Le Pen, the leader of the far-right anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party, who had hoped to mount a fourth campaign to become president.
Le Pen, 56, said before the verdict that that any immediate ban on running for election would be like a “political death sentence” and that judges had “the power of life or death over our movement”. She is likely to immediately appeal against the verdict.
h/t DM and XC
On Wednesday, extreme-right figurehead Marine Le Pen led the charge in a no-confidence vote by partnering with the left, leaving the country without a government for the second time in roughly six months. Though their actions plunge France into another phase of political chaos, many assign equal blame to President Emmanuel Macron.
