Category: News

A French court convicted Marine Le Pen, leader of the populist National Rally (RN) party, on March 31, 2025, of “embezzling” European Parliament funds—but make no mistake, the move was nothing short of politically orchestrated lawfare.

Prosecutors alleged that from 2004 to 2017, during her time as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Le Pen and 24 co-defendants funneled over €3 million (~$3.2 million) earmarked for assistants to support their Brussels-based parliamentary work into party operations in France. For this, she received a four-year prison term—two years suspended, two under house arrest—a $108,000 fine, and a five-year ban from public office, slamming the door on a projected 2027 presidential election triumph.

Her lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, rightly calls the ban a “declaration of civil death.” RN president Jordan Bardella notes she is not the only victim: “It is French democracy that is being executed.”

‘POLITICAL BY DEFINITION.’

To be clear, RN doesn’t deny Le Pen’s assistants performed RN work. They argue that, as the leader of a national movement, advancing the RN platform she was elected on was a perfectly legitimate part of their work—particularly when it comes to fighting European Union overreach into national affairs.

“Parliamentary assistants do not work for the Parliament. They are political assistants to elected officials, political by definition,” she argued at trial. “Their role is to assist us in our political work, which is inseparable from our mandate as elected representatives.”

Such work is commonplace, even standard, among MEPs’ assistants, and the fact that Le Pen is being singled out is a dead giveaway of bias from a judiciary in lockstep with France’s liberal elite and the EU she’s vowed to defy.

DOUBLE STANDARDS.

Even if you accept that Le Pen violated some technical, selectively enforced interpretation of the European Parliament’s rules around assistants, the 56-year-old’s sentence is clearly disproportionate.

Contrast the iron fist used against her with Christine Lagarde’s velvet-glove treatment. In 2016, Lagarde, then France’s finance minister—later head of the International Monetary Fund, and now the head of the European Central Bank—was convicted of negligence over a €404 million (~$428 million) payout to businessman Bernard Tapie.

The court ruled her guilty but handed down no punishment at all—no fine, no jail, no ban. She sailed into one of Europe’s top jobs without consequence. Lagarde’s negligence dwarfed Le Pen’s €3 million case—but Europe’s elite cradle their own, like Lagarde, while smashing outsiders like Le Pen, whose anti-EU, populist politics threaten their power.

THE ROMANIAN PRECEDENT.

Polls show RN well ahead of the Renaissance party founded by Emmanuel Macron, and Le Pen was favored to win the next presidential election in 2027. Now, however, she will have no opportunity to defeat the establishment—because the French people will not be able to vote for her.

It mirrors the tactics used against Călin Georgescu, the Romanian populist barred from his country’s May 2025 presidential race. Georgescu, a skeptic of the EU and NATO, took a surprise win in the first round of the race last year—only for the courts to step in and cancel the election, ostensibly because voters had been tricked into supporting him by Russia-funded TikToks.

His supporters slammed this as a stitch-up by a rattled establishment, and polls suggested he would win a planned rerun—so the Constitutional Court made his exclusion permanent in a March ruling.

The EU playbook is clear: when populists like Le Pen and Georgescu surge, the EU doesn’t seek to defeat them at the ballot box; it shuts them out. Americans should be thankful similar partisan efforts to stop Donald Trump from standing last November failed, but they should be wary of the way Europe is normalizing such behavior.

Image by Vox España.