“The Paris appeal court has upheld” French politician “Marine Le Pen’s conviction for misusing EU funds but shortened her sentence, clearing the path for her to run in the April 2027 French presidential election,” reports The BBC:
A five-year ban on holding public office has been reduced and backdated to March 2025, and the court said it now considered the penalty had already been served.
However, the leader of the hard-right National Rally (RN) has been given a one-year term wearing an electronic ankle tag under house arrest, although that would not necessarily stop her running either.
Le Pen has said repeatedly she would not run for president if she had to wear an electronic tag as she would not feel “totally free” to campaign.
She is expected to announce whether she will stick with that decision in a national TV appearance tonight at 20:00 (19:00 BST) – and hand her candidacy to her protege, 30-year-old Jordan Bardella.
Marine Le Pen leads the opinion polls with under 10 months to go. She has run for the presidency three times already, and has lost twice in a row to Emmanuel Macron, who cannot run again.
Although the BBC claims Le Pen is “hard-right,” that is only true on certain social issues. On economics, she is to to the left of center-left French President Macron. On fiscal issues, Le Pen is worse than Macron.
As The Economist notes, both France’s socialists and nationalists like Le Pen are fiscally irresponsible, especially the hard left: “The hard left’s tax and spending splurge could lead to a ‘catastrophe’, according to Olivier Blanchard of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while the hard-right’s program ‘is like a Christmas tree, without logic or coherence’. Although neither bloc may gain a majority in parliament, France has high levels of public debt and a large deficit. As a result the public finances are more vulnerable than in the past to any divergence from centrist policies [caused by the socialists and nationalists], while the national [debt] interest bill will swell.”
France’s far-right National Rally voted with France’s communists to suspend France’s painful but necessary 2023 pension reform, which had raised the legal retirement age from 62 to 64. That reform, backed by centrists, was needed to slow the increase in government spending in France. It was needed to slow the increase in France’s national debt, which is now bigger than its economy. In a November 2025 vote in the French National Assembly, the National Rally aligned with left-wing parties to pass a measure freezing the gradual increase in the retirement age and suspending the reform until at least the 2027 presidential election.
“Lowering the retirement age into the teeth of demographic decline is economic and societal suicide, considering how hard it would be to undo. French youth unemployment at 17% now, would go even higher with wage change, and they would need to raise taxes on workers. Bonkers,” noted fiscal analyst David Ditch.
