Marine Le Pen cleared to run for French president in 2027 after Paris court eases ban

France's far-right leader Marine Le Pen can run for president in 2027 after all. The Paris Court of Appeal on Tuesday upheld her conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds but reworked the penalty that came with it, shortening a ban on holding elected office that had, until that afternoon, kept her out of the race to succeed Emmanuel Macron.

The decision reopens one of the central questions of French politics. When a lower court convicted Le Pen in March 2025 and imposed a five-year ban on running for office with immediate effect, it appeared to end the presidential ambitions of the candidate who came closest to power in 2022. Fifteen months later, an appellate panel has handed her a path back.

What the court decided

The judges confirmed the core of the case: that Le Pen and her party had used money earmarked for European Parliament assistants to pay staff working for the Rassemblement National in France between 2004 and 2016. They upheld a fine of roughly €100,000.

But the court recalibrated the ineligibility. It set the ban at 45 months, with 30 of them suspended. The remaining stretch was backdated to the original March 2025 verdict, meaning that in practice it has already run its course. Under that arithmetic, Le Pen is once again eligible to stand.

The ruling was not a clean acquittal of the penalty, however. The court also imposed a three-year custodial sentence, two years suspended, leaving one year to be served under house arrest with an electronic ankle monitor — a condition Le Pen had previously said would make a campaign impossible.

A candidacy declared, and an appeal filed

She left no ambiguity about her intentions. "Tonight, I am a candidate in the presidential election," Le Pen said on Tuesday evening, reversing her earlier warning that she would not campaign while tagged.

"My mind was made up very quickly, since I had indicated that I would not campaign wearing an ankle monitor."

The way out of that contradiction runs through France's highest court. Le Pen said she will take the ruling to the Cour de Cassation, and because that appeal suspends the sentence until the court rules, she would not have to wear the monitor during the campaign in the meantime. The final word on both her conviction and her freedom of movement now rests with a court that may not rule for many months.

The stakes for 2027

France votes in the first round of its next presidential election on 18 April 2027, with a run-off on 2 May. Macron, in his second term, cannot stand again, leaving the field unusually open. Le Pen, 57 and a three-time candidate, remains among the best-known figures in French politics and a consistent front-runner in early polling.

Her party had prepared for the alternative. Jordan Bardella, the 30-year-old president of the Rassemblement National, has been positioned as the fallback candidate and confirmed he would stand in her place if she were barred — while making clear he wanted Le Pen herself to be able to run. Tuesday's ruling, for now, keeps that succession plan on the shelf.

• Conviction upheld; fine of about €100,000 confirmed.
• Ineligibility shortened to 45 months, 30 suspended and the rest backdated — enough to let her run.
• One year of house arrest with an electronic tag ordered, suspended pending appeal.
• Le Pen to appeal to the Cour de Cassation; Bardella remains the backup.

A European institution at the centre

For all that the case is a French drama, its subject is European money. The funds Le Pen was found to have misused were parliamentary-assistant allowances paid by the European Parliament, whose administrative Secretariat-General is based in Luxembourg. The affair is one of a long series in which the Parliament's own resources have become the material of national scandal, and it feeds a wider argument in Brussels and Strasbourg over how tightly the institution polices the money it channels to members and their staff.

The political reaction in France was immediate and split along familiar lines, with opponents warning against any suggestion that a conviction had been softened for a leading candidate, and Le Pen's camp casting the long legal fight as an attempt to remove her from the ballot. What is no longer in doubt is that she intends to be on it.