Today was the day that the hanging sword of French justice, which has been hovering over Marine Le Pen, leader of the French populist party National Rally (RN), was set to drop for the third and final time.
A year ago, in March, Le Pen had been convicted of embezzlement in what many, including political rivals, considered a convenient show trial to remove her from the upcoming presidential election. What had many in France aghast was the unprecedented penalty, besides a suspended prison sentence, that came with the conviction – a five-year ban from running for office.
…The BBC had an update just a bit ago…
Breaking
We’ve just had it confirmed that Marine Le Pen has been banned from running for office for five years.
This means she will not be able to contest the French presidential election in 2027.
Talk about clearing the rivals off the deck.
Prosecutors even attempted to twist the system so that her ban was immediate, instead of dependent on how she fared during the appeals process. In other words, they were cutting her out of the entire campaign cycle from start to finish, although they were allowing her to keep her parliamentary seat.
None of that made any sense unless you looked at it through a dark, cynical glass.
The judges in the case cited Le Pen’s propensity for ‘provocative incidents’ as justification for the extraordinary restrictions imposed on her.
Suspiciously like ‘saving democracy,’ no?
Depends if it still is one, I guess.
…’Is France still a democracy?’
…The dramatic judicial intervention into the French presidential campaign is threatening to deny to voters the choice of the candidate who is ahead in all opinion polls. On the news channels this lunchtime, the question was being posed: is France still a democracy?
Last September, Emmanuel Macron’s government collapsed in chaos again – I think he was on Prime Minister No. 4 – and Le Pen had her second in command, Jordan Bardella, ready to go if Macron called snap elections, as her appeal trial wasn’t scheduled until January.
…Macron is a devious twit, but Le Pen is on to him.
…Le Pen warned that the anger of French voters should not be underestimated if she were barred from running, saying such a scenario could render the elections illegitimate.
But she has also asked her top lieutenant Jordan Bardella, 29, to prepare for a run, saying in an interview that he “may have to take up the torch”.
Bardella, Le Pen’s protege who replaced her as head of the National Rally in 2022, is widely seen as her heir apparent.
After going through the appeal process this spring, the court handed down its ruling today. While the court upheld Le Pen’s conviction, ordered electronic monitoring, and knocked down the fines, most importantly, it also neutralized the effect of the campaign ban by suspending 3/4 of the sentence.
Le Pen can run for president.
KATY BAR THE FRICKIN’ DOOR, CUZ IT’S ON
Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, announced on Tuesday that she will run for president of France, hours after a court upheld an embezzlement conviction against her but lifted a ban on her seeking public office.
The decision, on a day of rapid-fire legal and political developments, is a stunning turnaround in Ms. Le Pen’s fortunes. For more than a year, her candidacy had been viewed as close to a lost cause, after her initial conviction on corruption charges came with a crippling five-year ban on seeking public office.
Her protégé, Jordan Bardella, was primed to step into her place as the candidate of the far-right party, the National Rally, if she had been ruled ineligible. Instead, Ms. Le Pen said, she will make her fourth bid for the presidency in 2027, having crept closer to victory in each of her last three campaigns.
Now, she is the front-runner in the race, outpolling most of her rivals in many recent surveys.
…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.
🚨 ALERTE INFO – La cour d’appel de Paris reconnaît qu’il n’y a pas eu d’enrichissement personnel dans l’affaire concernant Marine Le Pen. pic.twitter.com/IinlWIE1J9
— Bleu Blanc Rouge ! 🇫🇷 (@LBleuBlancRouge) July 7, 2026
NEWS ALERT – The Paris Court of Appeal recognizes that there was no personal enrichment in the case concerning Marine Le Pen.
It turns out that Le Pen can campaign without an ankle bracelet while she argues an appeal over the requirement.
Marine LePen vient d’annoncer qu’elle fera campagne sans bracelet électronique car elle va se pouvoir en cassation.
Elle est donc candidate à l’élection présidentielle. pic.twitter.com/WpV4OJmepy— 🇫🇷 fred le gaulois 🇫🇷 Uniondesdroites 🐱🐱 (@FredGaulois) July 7, 2026
Marine Le Pen has just announced that she will campaign without an electronic bracelet because she will be able to appeal in cassation. She is therefore a candidate in the presidential election.
This is going to make things very spicy for the French presidential elections now.
Unlike the last time Macron called snap elections, in which Le Pen’s party handily won the first round only to have the next rounds stolen out from under them by backroom wheeling and dealing between rival parties (you have to love the parliamentary system’s room to maneuver), this time RN is in the captain’s chair as the country’s most popular party, and France is demonstrably in a much worse place.
…Le Pen is “a better candidate than Bardella,” said an official belonging to Edouard Philippe’s center-right Horizons party. “She’s become a more reassuring figure and has widened her appeal.”
“This woman is very intelligent. She is not here by accident,” said far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon last month. “And if she is a candidate for the fourth time, there won’t be any sniggering about her as an opponent.”
Her supporters believe she now has her best shot yet at reaching the Elysée Palace. Since she lost to Macron in the 2022 runoff with 41 percent of the vote, her far-right National Rally has become the most popular party in the country.
Le Pen is just the person to finally make her way to the top.
…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.
Now, she finds herself potentially closer to the pinnacle of French politics than at any point in her career.
And I cannot imagine how thrilled the Empress of Europe, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, will be with this development.
That alone would be worth the price of admission.
Le Pen and Bardella have an event at a market scheduled for tomorrow, and then a party leadership meeting.
FIGHT’S ON
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